“Yeah, well,” the chief says. “If it was perfect real estate, everyone would want it. We’re just a frozen little moon at the ass end of the Thirty. I doubt even the Lankies would be interested in this place. The Chinese or the Russians sure haven’t bothered us any.”
“Good thing, too,” Colonel Decker says, looking up from the stack of printouts he has been studying for the past fifteen minutes. “’Cause your planetary defense network is a pile of shit. I’ve seen welfare clusters that were better defended than this moon. Whoever designed this defense grid needs to be fired for gross incompetence, or shot for treason. Maybe both.”
“In all fairness, we’re not a settled planet,” Chief Barnett says. “This is just a scientific research station and a water stop. We won’t be ready for full colonization until those atmo processors have done their thing for another ten years.”
“Still,” Colonel Decker says. “No orbital defenses. No nuclear stockpile. Not a scrap of long-range artillery. One airfield big enough to support fleet ops, and that one’s right next to the only settlement on the moon. No combat armor except for a half dozen mules at Frostbite. Absolutely no integrated air defenses. A pack of Cub Scouts with pocketknives could take this moon.”
“I don’t know, Colonel,” Sergeant Fallon says. “All things considered, I’m kind of glad the space monkeys over at Frostbite don’t have any tanks or artillery at their disposal right now.”
“That’s one way to look at it. Glad you haven’t lost your ability to see the silver lining, Sergeant.”
“Yes, I have,” she says. “Back on Earth. Right around the time I had to shoot my first welfare rat out rioting for something to eat other than recycled shit.”
“You know we’re fucked one way or the other, right?” Sergeant Fallon says to me a little while later when we step outside for some fresh air. The temperature has dropped so much in the last few hours that I’m very grateful for the heating elements in my battle armor.
“Yeah,” I say. “Fleet wins, we end up in the brig, and then it’s off to military prison for the next twenty years. We win, we get to hang on to this frozen wasteland only until they turn the network back on, and more fleet shows up. Network stays down, we have to worry about the Lankies finding us. No happy endings either way.”
“So why’d you switch sides? You know I wouldn’t have kept you from going back to Frostbite with those drop-ship jocks, right?”
“I know that.” I peel my unit patch off the pauldron of my battle armor and look at it. “Bunch of reasons, really.”
“Like what?”
“Because I didn’t like the stuff we had to do back in the TA. All those riot drops we did. I mean, they were shooting at us in those welfare clusters, but only because we dropped into their living rooms ready to kick their asses, you know? I don’t hold a grudge. Not even over the two rounds I took in Detroit.”
Sergeant Fallon looks at me with an unreadable expression.
“And then I get the fleet billet,” I continue. “The whole shit with the Lankies started, and I actually felt good about what I was doing. Saving humanity, and all that shit. Hell, even fighting the Russians and the Chinese. At least they were legit enemies. And they were just as well armed as we were. I don’t hold grudges there, either. But it’s like you told the fleet over comms. I’ll be damned if I go back to that ghetto police shit. We turn against our own, we have no fucking reason for existing.”
Sergeant Fallon smiles, something she does so rarely that she looks like a completely different person for a moment.
“We’re supposed to be hard-asses, Andrew. That’s why we get the guns, and the special chow, and the bank accounts at the end. So we stay on the leash and bite everyone they point us at.”
“Point me at a Lanky colony, and I’ll let you shoot me right into it with a bio-pod from orbit, and call in a nuclear strike on my own position. But if they want me to play prison guard again, they need to find someone else.”
“That’s what we were supposed to do,” she says. “That’s why we came along for the trip. Get us off Earth, make us keep the civvies in line like we do back home. You guys were supposed to hold our leashes.”
“Not working out all that well so far, is it?”
“No, it isn’t.” She kicks a few pebbles with the toe of her boot. “Truth be told, I wouldn’t mind being a fly on the wall back at Defense on Earth right now. If they can’t count on their crack outfits to keep some HD reprobates under control out here away from the press, I doubt they’re having better luck back home. Maybe there won’t even be a North American Commonwealth by the time we get home. If we ever get home, that is.”