She looks at her mother again, who seems to be out of good retorts.
“If I get pregnant before we finish our service, I’ll have the embryo frozen until I make it out of the corps alive. If we both die in the service, I’ll have it destroyed. I’ll run naked through a Category Five PRC waving commissary vouchers before I let you get your hands on that child and fuck it up like you tried to fuck me up. I’m done with you for good.”
Halley’s dad looks like he’s about to break into tears. Her mom just stands there, with a stony expression, jaw muscles clenching visibly, but Halley pays her no more attention. Instead, she turns to her father.
“Dad, you can give us a ride to the transit station if you want. If not, we’ll walk. No big deal. But we are leaving for Lackland. We’ll stay on base in the Transient Personnel Unit and get a ride back north tomorrow morning.”
Her father elects to drive us back to the transit station. Neither Halley nor I say good-bye to her mother, who disappears upstairs anyway while we get our gear bags and put them by the front door.
When we pull up to the transit plaza, Halley’s dad starts crying quietly. She puts a hand on his arm and leaves it there for a few moments.
“I meant it, Dad. I don’t want to see her again. But you can still message me through MilNet if you want.”
“Don’t blame me for her,” he says. “Your mother has never been an easy woman to live with.”
“I don’t blame you totally,” Halley says. “She’s a hard woman to stand up to. But when you stand by while she’s trying to fuck with my marriage, you’re not helping, either.”
She leans over and kisses him on the cheek.
“Good-bye, Dad. I’ll keep you posted if I can. Maybe you can visit us up in Vermont after it’s all over. But come by yourself, because she’s not welcome.”
When her dad’s hydrocar disappears in the distance, Halley lets out a long, shaky breath, as if she had just relieved herself of a terrible burden. I want to make a quip about how the day has improved, something to break the tension and share some levity, but I don’t feel that it’s appropriate right now. In any case, Halley preempts me. With her father’s car finally out of sight, she hugs me firmly and breaks into tears. And for a few minutes, I do the only thing I can do right now. I hold my wife and let her come to terms with what happened.
“Thank you,” I tell her when she has dried her eyes on the sleeves of her uniform.
“Can’t promise I’ll always take your side on everything,” she says, and kisses me. “But I can promise you that I’ll stand with you every time. Against anyone.”
We sort ourselves out and shoulder our bags to go back into the transit station for the ride back to Joint Base Lackland. The TPU quarters we’ll share tonight will be far less luxurious than the guest bedroom back at the house we just left, but I know I’ll be sleeping infinitely better tonight despite the hard and narrow military cots and the crummy chow waiting for us there.
CHAPTER 8
FINAL DAYS
It’s strange to think of any place on Earth as home again after all this time moving around for the corps, but I’ve come to think of Liberty Falls that way, even if it is a middle-class enclave and nothing like my old neighborhood. I don’t feel shame anymore for enjoying the ’burber amenities—real trees, grass, decent food, and safe streets. It’s the very tail end of fall, and the nights are cold, but the air is clean, and I know there will be snow any day now.
Halley and I are sitting in a booth in Chief Kopka’s restaurant, drinking coffee and sharing some pancakes for breakfast, when our PDPs buzz with incoming message alerts at the same time again.
After having the damn things in your pocket constantly for over half a decade, you are attuned to them beyond the different vibration and sound patterns for critical or routine alerts. The haptic engines in the PDPs can only vary the strength of the vibration and its length, but every troop will swear that some alerts feel weightier than others. Halley has been moved back to active duty and flight status since we got back from San Antonio, so whatever is going on right now will draw in both of us.
Halley and I look at each other as we take our PDPs out of our pockets.
“Deployment orders,” she says.
“Probably just admin shit,” I counter. “Change of menus at the chow hall.”
“You wish.” She smiles and turns on her device, and I follow suit. We both look at our incoming messages for a few moments.
“Deployment orders,” I concede.
I am ordered to report to Joint Base Coronado for predeployment fitting of a new bug suit, after which I am to report to a new command: SOCOM Task Force Red.
“What the fuck is SOCOM Task Force Red?” Halley says when I show her the text on my screen. I scroll through the message until I find the deployment location.
“Embarked on NACS Phalanx,” I read. “One of the Hammerhead space control cans.”
“Pod drop,” Halley says matter-of-factly, and I nod.
She flips her PDP around so I can read her orders. She has to report to Assault Transport Squadron Five on NACS Pollux (CV-2153) to take command of the squadron’s Alpha Flight. ATS-5 and Pollux are part of Task Force Purple, whatever that is.
“Looks like we won’t be riding to Mars in the same bus,” Halley says.
“Nope.”
I don’t dispute her determination of our deployment target, even though the orders make no mention of it. We all know where we’re about to go and what we are about to fight.
We both look at our screens for a few moments without saying anything. Then Halley puts her PDP facedown on the table and picks up her coffee mug.
“That’s in three days. I suppose we don’t have to rush breakfast.”
In a way, it’s freeing to know our date and time of deployment precisely, to be able to count down our remaining time on Earth to the hour and minute without having to anticipate the alert buzz of the electronic leashes in our trouser pockets.
The Lazarus Brigades are now semiofficial ancillaries of the corps, but they’re not so tightly integrated that I can reach Sergeant Fallon easily via MilNet. We do, however, have backdoor channels for exchanging updates, and I send my old squad leader a status update to let her know when we’re going to Mars even though I’m sure that Lazarus’s intelligence network is already aware of the news. Sergeant Fallon sends me a message back a few hours later through the shadow account we set up just for communications between us.
>Better you than me. I’d tell you to be careful, but you’re in the business of seeking out shit to stir. Good luck to you and your wife, and God help the Lankies. See you on the other side.
All my best,
Briana
I wish I could get Sergeant Fallon to serve under me again, but she’s not qualified to do pod drops, and I doubt that a division of SI could pry her out of her PRC and get her to go back into space. And in all honesty, I’m glad she’ll get to sit this one out.