The house is air-conditioned and quiet except for the muted din of low conversations from the dining room. The floors are covered in synthetic laminate that looks just like wood—not even Halley’s parents would be able to afford real wooden floors—and the place looks more like a suburban lifestyle museum than a dwelling. Maybe it’s the years I’ve spent in military berthing, or my childhood in the PRC, but the living space Halley’s parents have for just two people seems wastefully excessive. The house is so big that you could subdivide it and turn it into half a dozen PRC apartments at least. There’s a big entrance foyer, a living room bigger than my mother’s old two-bedroom unit, a kitchen full of gleaming appliances and shiny gray countertops, and three separate bedrooms. They even have two bathrooms, both with showers, and both more spacious than an officer berth on a warship. This is only the third time I’ve set foot into this house, and I’m even more appalled by all this waste of space than on my previous visits.
“I had the guest bedroom made up for you,” Halley’s mother says. She leads us over to the door and slides it open. “The dresser is empty, if you want to unpack your things, but it doesn’t look like you brought much. Why don’t you freshen up a bit and then come say hi to everyone before dinner?”
We drop our alert bags in the guest bedroom and unpack the little weekend bags we brought while Halley’s mother wanders off toward the living room to tend to her guests again. Neither of us brought civvie clothes—I haven’t even worn any nonissued clothing in over a year, and I’m pretty sure Halley doesn’t even own anything but CDUs and flight suits anymore. Halley takes her PDW out of her alert bag, removes the magazine, checks the chamber, and aims the weapon at the floor while peering into the electronic sight on top of the gun. Then she smacks the bolt release of the little submachine gun with her palm, to let the bolt ride home in the noisiest and most mechanical-sounding manner. She looks at me and smirks.
“I want to wear this thing slung in front of my chest when we sit down for dinner,” she says. “Next time I’ll bring an M-95 and lean that meter-and-a-half-tall son of a bitch against the kitchen counter while we eat.”
“Why stop there? I’m sure I can get a MARS launcher out of the armory,” I reply with a grin, which she returns.
She stows her PDW back in the alert bag and fastens the stickythread strips that hold the weapon in the bag firmly.
“On the other hand, this may be our last visit,” she says. “That would be the only good thing about buying it on Mars.”
There are a bunch of people in the dining room when Halley and I make our entrance, and all heads turn toward us. I sense Halley stiffen when she recognizes someone in the group, but they’re all people I’ve never met before.
“Everyone, you know Diana,” Halley’s mom says to the group. “And this is her husband, Andrew.”
She introduces me to everyone separately. The guests are two couples about the age of Halley’s parents and just as clean cut and well dressed, and a younger guy who looks to be in his late twenties. He’s handsome in the same regularly and carefully maintained way as Halley’s father, and I know he can smell the PRC on me the second we shake hands even though I left Boston for good over seven years ago.
“Andrew, this is Kenneth Harris. He went to school with Diana,” Halley’s mother says. “Ken, this is Andrew Grayson. He’s Diana’s husband. He’s an officer, too.”
“I’ve heard a lot about you,” Ken says.
“I’ve not heard a word about you,” I counter.
He smiles at me, exposing the typical straight and white teeth all ’burbers can afford. “Well, Diana and I go back quite a bit. We were together in school, before she went and joined the military.”
I exchange a look with Halley, who looks a little hot under the collar already. She sits down at the table, and her mom directs me to the chair to the left of her. Ken sits down in the chair on the other side of Halley, who almost but not quite flinches when she realizes how her mother has arranged the seating order.
“Hands off your sidearm,” I murmur, and she lets out a soft chuckle, but we both know that I am only mostly joking.
The dinner is a strange and awkward affair. Halley’s mom introduces us to the other couples at the table and tells them about our history together, our jobs in the military, and our contributions in the Battle of Earth last year. The ’burber friends make appropriate noises of wonder and appreciation, but it’s all as forced as a recruiting commercial on the Networks. She also gets so much of our job descriptions incorrect that we find ourselves taking over her explanations and bending them back into something resembling reality.
“Well, I’m not a military person,” she says when we’ve corrected our job descriptions for the audience at the table. “I’ve never been a fan of guns.”
“They came in pretty handy last year when the Lankies made planetfall,” Halley says. “Worked better than strongly worded petitions.”
Guns are what keep your little paradise from getting overrun by half a million pissed-off welfare rats, I think, but I’m too polite to toss that out in front of the dinner crowd. Instead, I just look around in the dining room and imagine what a bunch of soy-fed, hardened PRC gang members would do to this air-conditioned place and its immaculate floors, inhabited by people who look down on the soldiers and cops that keep this place safe from the unwashed masses. Is this what we fought for all these years? So these squeaky-clean, stuck-up suburbanites can keep thinking of us as something necessary but embarrassing, like the ugly guard dog you keep in the basement when visitors stop by?
The family friends at the dinner table are pleasant and polite, but the difference between them and people like me has never been clearer to me until now. Their outlooks and experiences are so different from mine that we may as well be separate species. They mean well, and I know they don’t want to sound like they’re talking down to us, but they are. We progress through a dinner of salad and grilled fish, and every minute of awkward and cautious conversation feels like an hour. I notice that Halley’s mother tries to steer Halley and Ken toward talking about their time in school together, attempts that Halley shoots down curtly and abruptly.
For dessert, Halley’s mother serves up fresh fruit with a side of real cream, a decadence worthy of Chief Kopka’s restaurant. Halley and I enjoy the slices of melon and the grapes and strawberries carefully one by one.
“We haven’t had any fresh fruit in the fleet since last year,” I say, and the statement is met with polite interest around the table.
“So the quality of the military meals has gone down?” Ken says next to Halley. “That’s a shame. I thought that was part of your contracts.”
“Not the food,” Halley says. “That was always understood to be a perk. But it wasn’t set in stone. We have less to go around now, and the priorities are with the Orions and the new battleships.”
“Yes, we have spent a great deal of time on those missiles,” Halley’s father says. “The Russians and the Chinese even sent over teams for collaboration, if you can believe that. They have good ideas, but they have this crowbar approach to hardware.”
“They have that approach to battle, too,” I say. “But they know their stuff. I’ve worked with a few of their people.”