“They won’t let you copy anything off the MilNet terminals,” I remind her. “And the automatic censor will strip out all the last names and ship names.”
“So you’ll keep the messages short,” Mom says. “I’ll go straight home, type them into my public net terminal, and send them on to the chief here. No big deal. Least I can do for all this fantastic food he’s been feeding us.”
I exchange glances with the master chief, and we both smile at Mom’s eagerness to skirt regulations.
“Well, I’d sure appreciate that, ma’am,” the chief tells her. He pulls a menu out of his apron, opens it to the last page, and puts it in front of Mom.
“Hope you saved some room for dessert.”
When we leave Chief Kopka’s little restaurant half an hour later, Mom walks out of the place with a slight stagger, like someone who has had just that one drink too many.
“I think I just had more calories for breakfast than I’ve eaten all week,” she says to me, glancing over her shoulder at the restaurant we just left. “I can’t believe he fed us all that food for free.”
“I can’t believe we ran into a fellow podhead,” I say. “Aren’t too many of those around, in the service or out of it.”
While we were eating our opulent breakfast inside, the sky above Liberty Falls had turned from mostly blue to mostly gray, and as we walk down Main Street again, snow starts falling in thick, white flakes that swirl around us silently in the morning breeze. Mom squints up into the sky, a serene smile on her face.
“I wish I could just drop dead on the spot, right here and now,” she says.
Five years ago, I would have been appalled at that sentiment, but now I know exactly what she means.
CHAPTER 7
When I was still a civilian, the moon was a mythical destination. Our first permanent base in space, yet still in view of Earth—with a decent telescope and a clear sky, you can see most of the structures on the Earth-facing side of Luna. When I was a kid, I used to dream up all kinds of imaginative and wildly impractical ways to get up there without the money for a ticket to Luna City.
After five years of service in the fleet, I’ve been on Luna dozens of times. I’ve been back for Fleet School, tech school, and half a dozen specialty courses for the combat controller career track. By now, any mystique the location once held for me has long since evaporated. Part of the reason may be that the military buildings on the moon are generally windowless, so being in a building on Luna feels just like being in a starship that’s under way. We did get to do a lot of vacuum excursions during combat controller training, but I was usually too busy filling my battle armor with sweat to stop and admire the view. Most of the military installations are on the dark side of Luna anyway, so there’s nothing to see overhead but empty space and distant stars.
Nobody comes up to Luna for fun. On my shuttle ride over from Gateway on Saturday morning, I’m the only one in the passenger compartment who isn’t obviously on the way to a new duty station. On a normal weekend day, transit shuttles to and from Luna are usually half empty, but this one is full almost to the last seat, evidence of the accelerated training schedule adopted by the fleet. We’re losing more and more ground to the Lankies, but we’re stuffing more and more garrison troops onto the worlds we have left, and the fights with the SRA over the remaining real estate out there are getting more vicious and costly.
Halley is an instructor at the Combat Flight School. CFS takes up a fair chunk of lunar real estate on the fringes of the huge Fleet School complex. I ride the lunar transit tube out to the CFS stop, and by the time the doors of the tube pod open, I am the last passenger on the train.
Halley is already waiting for me when I walk through the double airlock that separates the transit platform from the main hub of the fleet’s Combat Flight School. She’s standing in front of the CQ station, bouncing up and down lightly on the toes of her flight boots. She’s wearing an olive-green flight suit and her usual short and shaggy helmet-friendly haircut.
“Sorry I’m late,” I say as I walk up to the CQ station to sign myself in. “They wouldn’t let me catch a shuttle from Gateway earlier.”
There’s a corporal staffing the CQ post, and I step in front of Halley to render a formal salute to an officer in the presence of junior ranks. Before I can bring my hand up to the headband of my beret, Halley grabs me by the lapel of my Class A smock and pulls me toward her. The corporal behind the CQ desk looks away as she plants a firm kiss on my lips.
“Welcome to Drop Ship Elementary, Sergeant,” Halley says when she releases me again. “Now let’s get up to my berth, so I can peel off this monkey suit and have my way with you.”