“Lovely. Get killed by the Lankies, or starve to death eventually. I suppose there isn’t much of a point for me to update my résumé.”
“Welcome to the end of the species,” I say. “At least we have ringside seats.”
“Well.” Dr. Stewart folds her hands in her lap and looks at the standby pattern of the holoscreen again. Then she looks at us and shrugs. “I’m not too good at sitting on my ass and waiting for the shot clock to run out. Now, I’m no good at shooting a gun or flying a drop ship, but I have a scientific research facility full of smart people. Is there anything we can do to improve our position? Do you have a plan of some kind?”
Sergeant Fallon smiles.
“That term implies a level of organization that I’m not willing to claim just yet. Right now, we’re still in the ‘winging it’ stage.”
CHAPTER 22
The fleet has a hard and not-very-generous weight limit for personal possessions. Shipping a kilogram of stuff over dozens of light years is insanely expensive, so each Fleet Arm member is entitled to just twenty kilos of nonissue items. We can send physical mail back home, but only a total of five hundred grams every six months, and we can only receive two hundred grams in return from Earth. The contents of the personal compartment of my locker weigh just under seven kilos, the less to haul around between deployments. I mailed my medal cases home to Mom over the years for safekeeping, and because I knew she would be pleased to have them. She never sent anything back until last year when I got a letter from her—not a MilNet e-mail, which we exchange every month or so, but an actual physical letter, written on sugarcane paper in her narrow old-fashioned cursive. It was just four pages long, and it contained nothing she couldn’t have typed into the MilNet terminal at the civil administration building back home, but it was a physical object, something that she had held in her own hands.
Right now, that letter is the only possession I have left. It’s tucked into the waterproof document pouch in my leg pocket, where it has been ever since I received it last year. All my other stuff is in a locker back at Camp Frostbite, unless the SI troops crammed into the place haven’t already dumped or looted all our gear. All I have left now are those four sheets of sugarcane paper, so thin you can almost see through them. As a welfare rat, I’ve never owned much, but I’ve never been entirely without possessions until now.
I’m peeling unit patches off my battle dress smock when there’s a knock on the door of the storage room that serves as my temporary berth.
“Come in.”
The door opens on creaky hinges, and Sergeant Fallon sticks her head into the room. She looks at the small pile of cloth patches at my feet and raises an eyebrow.
“Might as well dispense with the notion that we’re still members of an organized military,” I say. “I have half a mind to throw out all the rank sleeves as well.”
“Have the tailor make you some new ones,” she says. “Nobody says you can’t be a goddamn two-star general in this outfit.”
She steps into the room, crouches in front of me, and picks up one of the unit patches I discarded.
“Weird, isn’t it? We’ve spent so much time and sweat on these things, and in the end they’re just cheap-ass fabric squares with some sticky thread backing. Not much to show for fifteen years and half a leg, is it?”
“Don’t forget the bank account,” I say. “A million worthless Commonwealth bucks.”
“Almost three million worthless Commonwealth bucks,” she says. “Three reenlistment bonuses, a hundred and fifty monthly deposits, and jack squat to spend it all on. Just a bunch of numbers in a database somewhere, that’s all.”
She knocks on her prosthetic lower leg.
“There’s this little souvenir, of course, but I don’t think it counts. I wouldn’t have needed it if the military hadn’t sent me to the place where they blew off the original one.”
“What about the shiny medal on the blue ribbon?”
“The Medal of Honor?” She snorts a derisive little laugh. “That fucking thing. The moment they put that around my neck, I became a goddamn PR asset for the military. I had to practically blackmail them to stay in a combat billet. Although I will admit that it got me out of a court-martial or two. Doubt it’ll get me out of this mess, though.”
“They can’t put two entire battalions up against the wall,” I say.
“You haven’t been Earthside the last few years, Andrew. I honestly can’t say they wouldn’t. The more their grip on the rabble slips, the tighter they wrap the leash on their guard dogs.”