“Yeah, I know.” She shrugs and shakes her head slowly. “It’s just more comforting than thinking they’re that smart. Not when we’re about to go head to head against a few thousand of those things on Mars in a few weeks.”
I think of the footage we saw on Indy’s cameras when we did the high-speed flyby of Mars a little over a year ago on the way back to Earth. I’ve never seen more Lanky settlements in one place. We saw dozens of Lanky towns down there, and that was thirteen months ago. If they’ve kept up their pace, there’ll be twice as many towns on the surface of Mars now. Our usual plan of attack would be to nuke their settlements from orbit to spare us the casualties a ground assault would cost. If the Lankies on Mars anticipate our tactics the same way those ten or twelve interlopers on Greenland did, there aren’t enough troops among all the armies of Earth to take the planet away from them again.
Behind Halley, a medical NCO enters the room. He has a PDP in one hand and a meal tray in the other.
“How are you feeling, Lieutenant?” he asks.
“Little sore, but I’ll be fine,” I reply. “Are my CDUs out of decon yet, or can you scrounge me up a loaner set?”
The medical sergeant puts the meal tray down on my nightstand. “In a hurry to leave? With two ribs repaired, we ought to keep you here twenty-four hours.”
“Call the on-duty doc and get me clearance to go, please. I’ll be fine,” I repeat. “I’m only twenty minutes away. Pretty sure the captain here can drag me back in if I start bleeding from the eyes or something.”
The sergeant looks like he wants to argue but then seems to change his mind after glancing at Halley, who is frowning. He consults his PDP and shrugs.
“I’ll see what the doc says. Your CDUs should be out of decon by now. Why don’t you eat lunch while I track them down for you?”
“Thank you, Sergeant,” I say curtly. The medical sergeant nods and leaves the room.
“Wouldn’t hurt you to stay until tomorrow morning,” Halley says. “I have my final PT appointment at 0900 anyway. Doc said I’ll be put on flight status if I pass the tire-kicking tomorrow. I could come fetch you after.”
“I don’t sleep worth a shit in medical centers,” I say.
Halley inspects the meal tray on the nightstand. “You sure you want to pass on these delicacies?”
She picks up the fork on the tray and pokes the decidedly grayish-looking pile of mashed potatoes and the soymeat patty next to it.
“God, remember what the food was like when we joined? Real beef. Mash from real potatoes, with cream and garlic. Not this reconstituted powdered shit. Fresh veggies.”
“Pastries,” I add. “Doughnuts. Fresh fruit.”
“Those were the golden days,” Halley says. “Remember how we used to smuggle desserts back into the platoon bay to eat after lights-out?”
“Yeah. And the DIs knew about it all along. We ate the whole stash the night before graduation, remember?”
“Easier times,” Halley says with a smile. “At least back then we only had to worry about getting caught fooling around in the showers at night.”
I smile at the memory, which feels like it’s from an earlier life, lived by earlier versions of ourselves, cocky kids who didn’t know anything but thought they had the universe by the balls. Seven years ago, we were raw recruits, the military chow was the best food you could get in the NAC, we had over a hundred colonies, and there were three million settlers on Mars. A little more than half a decade later, we choke down the same shit as everyone else, all our colonies are gone or cut off from Earth, Mars is a graveyard with lethal CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, and we’re dancing on the razor’s edge of global apocalypse. Nobody in the military talks about retirement options anymore.
“I get flashbacks to Great Lakes Medical every time I stay in a med unit,” I say.
“You mean, after Detroit?”
I nod. “I think it’s the smell. Disinfectant and whatever else these places always smell like. I can’t stand it. No wonder hospital food tastes like shit.”
“Well, then.” Halley puts down the fork she has been using to prod the soymeat. “Let’s get you out of here as soon as the corporal comes back with your shit. Maybe Chief Kopka can whip up something made from ingredients that haven’t already been digested by someone else before.”
Twenty minutes later, we are walking out of Homeworld Defense Air Station Burlington and over to the maglev station. The weather outside is much sunnier than my mood. It’s a crisp and cold day, and the air here in Vermont smells even cleaner than usual. My side hurts like someone has been working it over with a meat tenderizer for a few hours, and the straps of my alert pack rub uncomfortably, but I don’t mind the discomfort. At least I am still alive to feel it. Somewhere on Greenland, there are twenty troopers who aren’t feeling anything anymore because they’ve been reduced to their component molecules by the nuclear warhead we fired at the Lanky lair.
“This feels so strange,” I say to Halley as we make our way across the station plaza, weaving through civilians on the way home from work, upper-middle-class ’burbers heading back to their safe little manufactured refuges along the Green Mountain maglev line.
“What does?” Halley asks.
“This part-time soldiering. Going to battle in the morning, and then being out in the civvie world in the afternoon. After Detroit, they didn’t even let us out of the squad bay without a psych eval. I was shooting at Lankies on Greenland a few hours ago, for fuck’s sake. Now I’m walking around in a public-transit station with an automatic weapon on my back.”
“I don’t know,” Halley replies. She looks up into the sky, which is showing patches of blue peeking through the cloud cover, and squints at the sun. “I don’t mind it so much. On Luna, I spent months between classroom, hangar, and quarters. I didn’t get to see anyone who wasn’t wearing a uniform.”