’BURBER THEME PARK
Before the Exodus and the first Lanky incursion a year ago, you could hopscotch your way across the continent on the maglev network by taking various regional lines to their hubs. Between the metroplexes, the maglev does four hundred kilometers per hour, so it was a reasonably efficient way to travel long distances. Since the Exodus, however, the network is fractured and fucked all to hell. There’s a crescent of what we now call dark territory, areas burned down in the riots or out of the control of the NAC government, where police were driven out, Lazarus Brigades haven’t moved in yet to restore a semblance of order, and the remaining HD battalions don’t dare to tread there. The swath of dark territory cuts right across the midsection of the country and then curves down through much of the southeastern NAC. The trains now stop short of entering dark territory, because there’s no security, and nobody in their right mind wants to go into the massive conglomeration of out-of-control PRCs anyway.
Luckily, the dark territory cuts the northern maglev routes off from the southern ones, and Halley’s parents live on the other side of it. Unluckily, they live in San Antonio, which is still under full NAC control because it is the southern military hub of the NAC Defense Corps. It’s the site of one of our recruit depots, and it hosts Joint Base Lackland, the biggest air/space facility in the southern NAC. That means it’s not hard at all to get there by military air transport. So three days after the mess on Greenland, Halley and I leapfrog our way south on a succession of military shuttle flights, to visit her parents in their safe little enclave.
“I feel like a crate of combat rations,” Halley half shouts to me when the transport shuttle lurches in rough air for what feels like the fiftieth time since we left HDAS Norfolk on our third hop toward San Antonio.
“Doubt it,” I reply. “Combat rations can’t get queasy. You look a little green. Are you sure you’re a pilot?”
“It’s like driving,” she says. “I’m fine when I’m behind the stick. Put me in the back, and I get motion sickness. Especially in these flying dump trucks.”
We can hitch rides on military transports as a perk of our status, but that perk comes with a few snags. The shuttle fleet is mostly cargo haulers, so if you don’t have one of the personnel movers going where you want to go—which is going to be most of the time—you ride in the windowless cargo hold, strapped into a ratty sling seat next to a few tons of priority military freight. It’s faster than the maglev trains, but that’s about the only good thing about this ride. If we could have taken the train to San Antonio, I would have preferred that mode—both for comfort and the fact that it would have taken another day before I have to put up with Halley’s parents again.
The shuttle lurches again, more violently than before. My stomach does a little backflip. I don’t ever regret having lunch at Chief Kopka’s place, but right now I wish I hadn’t had the maple pudding for dessert. When I tell Halley this, she laughs.
“I can’t see how anyone could have turned that down. He had real maple syrup. I hadn’t had any in years.”
“My first time,” I say, and try to ignore the roiling feeling in my midsection. “I swear to you, if we crash into a dark PRC, I’ll give you no end of shit for this.”
The PDP in my pocket buzzes to notify me of an incoming message. I pry it out of the pocket of my CDU trousers with a feeling of dread. Halley reaches for her pocket at the same moment, so I know her PDP buzzed at the same moment as mine.
“Shit,” I say. “Here goes.”
I turn on the screen and read the message I just received. It’s not a priority alert ordering us to report to the nearest regional military assembly point. I read the brief text, two paragraphs in total, and the relief I feel mixes with irritation. I hold the screen out to Halley so she can read it.
“I don’t believe this shit. Of all the priorities.”
Halley looks at my screen and then shoots me hers. She got an identical message, with just a few words differing from the one on my screen. Both messages are from NAC Fleet Command. Both are boilerplate notifications. Halley and I manage to curse at precisely the same time.
Our messages notify us that we have been awarded decorations for valor for our actions on Arcadia. The only difference in the messages is the award name: mine is a Silver Star; Halley’s is a Distinguished Flying Cross. According to the documentation, both were put in by the CO of the ground operation: Major Khaled Masoud, fleet Special Operations Command.
“It’s only been a month,” Halley says. “Why the hell would they ram this through so quickly?”
I erase the message from my inbox and stuff my PDP back into its pocket. “Fuck that.”
“You can’t turn it down. It’s already part of our personnel files.”
Once upon a time, they used to do award ceremonies—they’d have the highest ranking officer of your battalion or division pin the medal onto your CDU blouse. Since the Lanky business kicked off, medals get awarded through the computer system, and nobody bothers sending out physical medals anymore. If Halley and I wanted the actual tin, we could pick it up at the supply unit on base, same way you’d get a new pair of boots or a clean set of sheets. They’d check our personnel files in the system to verify and hand them over without any pomp or ceremony.
“I’m not adding that star to the ribbon,” I say. “Didn’t do a thing to earn it.”
“That’s bullshit, Andrew, and you know it. Don’t talk out of your ass.”
I want to tell her how many people my platoon lost in the assault I ordered, but she already knows. I want to tell her that the mission would have failed without Major Masoud and his SEALs pulling the trigger on their nuclear surprise for the renegade leadership, but she knows that, too. I can’t argue that she didn’t earn her second DFC—her flying saved the lives of two platoons, after all—but I refuse to accept a reward for losing a third of my platoon. I don’t want to look at the star on that ribbon and be reminded of the unlucky private that was blown apart by an autocannon burst five meters in front of me. Or Lieutenant Dorian, who saved our asses as our drop-ship pilot several times before that Shrike shot him out of the sky, just a few minutes before the surrender of the renegade garrison.
“He knows I hate his fucking guts,” I say. “Why would he put me in for a valor award?”
“Maybe because he thinks you earned it,” she says. “Maybe because he wanted to give the brass some motivational items for the fleet news. Maybe both. Who cares?”
I decide to drop the subject, but the whole thing has made me cranky. Getting a Silver Star should be a momentous occasion in a military career. It shouldn’t feel like I just got used by Major Masoud once again for his own ends.
“I hope I see him on the ride to Mars, so I can tell him to stick it up his ass,” I say.