“What?” I laugh. “Who the fuck looks forward to combat? Other than psychopaths. Or maybe Sergeant Fallon.”
“Come on, now. I know you. You were a bit of a mess before Arcadia. So tense I could practically hear the humming coming from your nerve strands. And now you’re all calm about Mars. Projecting a win, even.”
I shake my head. “I’m not calm about it. And I’m sure as hell not looking forward to it.”
“What is it, then?”
“I’m looking forward to finally being done with it,” I say. “One way or the other. It’s been hanging over our heads for over a year now.”
“One way or the other,” Halley repeats.
We eat in silence for a little while. Halley finishes her soup and methodically scrapes out the little thermal container with her spoon to get every last bit of it.
“Buying it on Mars isn’t my worst fear,” she says. “I don’t want to check out just yet, but I’m not afraid of it.”
“Then what is your worst fear?” I ask.
“Coming back without you,” she says. Then she pops the lid back onto the soup container and puts it back in the bag. I am not used to Halley getting sentimental or mushy on me, and I’m still trying to decide how to respond when she stands up and shoulders our lunch bag.
“Come on,” she says. “Let’s see if we can make the top of the next hill before we eat those sandwiches. We’ll be cooped up in a spaceship before too long. Might as well stretch our legs while we can.”
“Might as well,” I agree.
We pack up our little bit of gear and shoulder our packs again. I carefully watch Halley when she puts on her pack and notice that she grimaces a little bit when she slips the straps onto her shoulders, but she looks back at me with determination and nods toward the path.
“After you, Lieutenant.”
“That first part is downhill,” I say. “Speed march, six minutes per kilometer. Let me know when you can’t hack it anymore.”
She grins at this open challenge, as I knew she would.
“The day I tap out of a speed march with a light pack is the day I’ll start folding your laundry for you, Andrew.”
“Oh ho,” I say. “An incentive. Let’s go then, Captain.”
I turn and start trotting down the path, and Halley follows me, a renewed spring in her step. The path to the next little peak only goes on for two kilometers, but right now I wish it would stretch for a thousand.
When you’re embarked on a carrier and heading out for deployment to some backwater colony, and your ship is doing what seems like an interminably long transit to the Alcubierre node, three days seem like an eternity. But here in Vermont, with the knowledge of our impending separation, three days seem like no time at all. We go out into the hills during the days because it’s quiet and there are few other people, and because we won’t be able to see sky and trees again for quite a while. In the evenings, we spend time with my mother and Chief Kopka, having dinner and talking about the things we’ll do after Mars, more to keep my mother’s spirit up than ours. We spend the nights together, of course, upstairs in the chief’s guest bedroom, just the two of us, uninterrupted time without any 1MC announcements or alerts blaring outside our door. In all my time with Halley since we got married on Regulus last year, the three days before our deployment are the most peaceful ones I’ve had since I joined the military.
On the morning of our departure, we wake up early and have breakfast downstairs in the still-dark restaurant while the chief and my mother are conducting their preopening business, making coffee and preparing the menu’s breakfast items. They’re a bit more sparse and a lot more expensive than they used to be the first time I came to this restaurant, but the food is still way beyond anything the military serves, better even than the good stuff we got to eat when I first signed up. We have coffee, scrambled eggs, and bacon, and the chief made us a tall stack of pancakes and decanted some of his diminishing maple syrup reserve. I want to drag this breakfast out forever, but time advances with no regard for my sentiment. We usually clear out and vacate the table before the chief opens his restaurant at seven o’clock so we don’t take up space for paying guests, and we stick to that routine today as well, but not before polishing off the entire stack of pancakes.
It’s just getting light outside when we step out, carrying our alert bags and dressed in freshly laundered CDU fatigues. It’s a Friday morning, and the November air is cold and smells like impending snow. The chief and my mother follow us outside to see us off to the train station for our fifteen-minute ride to Burlington, where we will take separate shuttles to get to our next commands. Halley’s ship is docked at Gateway. I have to hop across the country to get to Coronado on the West Coast before I can come up to Gateway as well. By the time I get there, Halley’s carrier will have already left for the assembly point.
“Godspeed,” Chief Kopka says, and shakes our hands firmly. “Give ’em hell. And watch your six.”
“Affirmative, Chief,” I reply. “Thanks for everything. Keep the heat on for us in the guest bedroom. We’ll be back before you know it.”
“I sincerely hope so. Wish I could go up there with you and stand my post again for a bit.”
“They’ll need you down here if things go to hell on Mars,” I say.
“If you all don’t come back, there won’t be much I can do here.”
“If we don’t come back, you close up shop, load all the food into your truck, and head north until you run out of continent,” Halley tells the chief. “You stay away from the big cities. The Brigades won’t be able to keep a lid on the pot if it all goes south. The Lankies don’t like cold places too much.”
I know that the chief is well aware of the fact that the Lankies’ first order of business during settlement is to scrape any humans off the planet with their nerve-gas pods. If they show up in orbit, they’ll drop those on the cities from up high. Then they’ll land their settler pods and start building terraformers to increase the CO2 content in the atmosphere to levels that are lethal for humans. If we lose the battle, and the Lankies show up uncontested, there will be no place on the planet remote enough where we can escape. But my mother is standing here with us to see us off, and nobody wants to hear that death is inevitable if our dice roll comes up short. So the chief just nods, and we go on pretending that it won’t be the end of all things if this mission fails.
“I know you hate it,” I tell my mother. Mom wipes a tear from her cheek and hugs me tightly, or as much as she can while I’m carrying twenty kilos of kit.