“I know you have to do this,” she says. “I know what’s at stake. And I’m proud of you for what you’re doing. But yes, I hate every damn minute of it when you’re gone. Mother’s prerogative.”
“I can’t argue with that, Mom.” I kiss her on the top of her head—she seems so small now—and return her hug. I look at Chief Kopka over the top of Mom’s head, and he nods. I know that if things don’t go well for us, he’ll take care of my mother until the last, and I know that he’ll do what needs to be done to spare them both a drawn-out, agonizing death at the hands of the Lankies. In any case, she’ll be much better off here with the chief than she would have been in the PRC, which will turn into the ninth circle of hell once the Lankies show up in force.
Mom hugs Halley, too, every bit as fiercely as she hugged me, and maybe even a few moments longer.
“Come back, the both of you,” she says. “Do what you have to, and come home. You two have a life to live when this is all over.”
We make the short walk to the train station in the cold morning air, in no particular hurry to get where we are going. We have to report to our new posts by the end of the day, and we’ll easily get there long before the deadline, even if we wait until noon to hop our flights.
As we walk up to the main entrance of the maglev station, a few snowflakes fall from the sky. They descend leisurely, buffeted by the cold morning wind. I look up at the gray sky and see more flakes drifting down, a first harbinger of the winter that’s about to come. I came to Liberty Falls for the first time on a winter day almost two years ago, and I’ll always see it in my mind with a blanket of clean snow covering the lawns and sidewalks, sparkling in the streetlights, making the town look like a relic from a long-gone time to someone from the PRCs. Maybe this isn’t reality—it certainly isn’t for any of the people I grew up with. But is it so bad to want to live like this instead of living out life in a stack of concrete boxes a hundred floors high?
Halley tries to chase down a snowflake with her tongue but misses. She catches the flake with the back of her hand instead and watches it melt on her warm skin. Then she looks over at me and smiles coyly, like I’ve just caught her doing something childish.
“Four weeks until Christmas,” she says. “Let’s not miss it. It’s my favorite time of the year down here.”
I don’t know what exactly it is about this moment that suddenly makes my heart hurt, and the pain I feel is far worse than the physical wounds I’ve collected in the service, because I know that there are no trauma packs for it. And I know that if I come back here without Halley, I’ll be broken in ways that no military surgeon will be able to fix.
The fifteen-minute train ride to Burlington feels like no time at all.
After so many years of separate deployments, Halley and I have a lot of practice saying good-bye. We both have dangerous jobs, so it makes no sense for this good-bye to feel any different, but it does. We check in at the gate together and climb into the same bus for the ride to the airfield. Ten minutes later, we’re in front of the air station’s ops center, where we will split up to catch our respective rides—hers straight up into orbit to Gateway, and mine to the other coast.
Halley kisses me and fixes the stand-up collar of my CDU fatigues, even though I know it needs no fixing.
“This is it,” she says. “The Big One. Are you nervous?”
“No,” I lie.
“Me, neither,” she lies right back.
“We’ll still be able to talk on MilNet. Unless they black out near-field comms, which they won’t. At least not until we’re out of the assembly area and well on the way to Mars.”
“So write,” she says. “Maybe we’ll even have the bandwidth for video.”
“Thank you for standing up for me back in San Antonio. Against your folks, I mean.”
Halley pulls me close for another kiss, ignoring the gaggle of enlisted personnel milling around nearby who are eyeing the two Fleet officers playing kissy-face.
“You are my folks now. They’re my parents, but you’re my husband. I’ll always take your side. Without blinking. Never doubt that.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” I say.
“I love you,” she says. “I always will, even when I’m back to being stardust.” Then she kisses me one more time and shoulders her alert bag.
“Let’s get this over with. Do your thing, and come back in one piece. You heard your mom. We have a life to live. And those spindly fucks are standing in the way of that.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I say.
I watch her as she walks out to the shuttle pad to catch her ride into orbit. My wife, the only constant thing in my life since I joined the military, and probably the best drop-ship pilot in the fleet. She has always known her course, and she has never failed to steer it. We’ve had the talk about death many times over the years. Not once did she say that she was scared of dying, and not once did I fail to feel gratitude for someone like her wanting to share her life with me. If I get nothing else in this life, I got that at least, and it’s enough.
“Let’s get this over with,” I repeat. Then I pick up my own alert bag and walk over to the atmospheric shuttle pad to board my own ride.
CHAPTER 9
GETTING THE BAND BACK TOGETHER
When we first encountered the Lankies, our military bureaucracy kicked R & D into high gear to come up with weapons and gear to fight the new threat. In typical bureaucratic fashion, even high gear took a few years to produce the first usable prototypes, and the new stuff was hit or miss. But one thing they definitely got right from the start was the new anti-Lanky battle armor. In the supply chain and in official documentation, it’s called the HEBA: hostile environment battle armor. The troops—those lucky enough to get issued one—call it the bug suit.
When I got my last bug suit, it took six days to get me fitted for one. The bug suits aren’t off-the-rack items. They have to be tailored to the user. In the almost five years since I got my suit, they’ve streamlined the fitting process down to a day. It’s still a day of mostly standing around while laser sensors map out every square millimeter of your body, but it beats the laborious hand-measured fitting process from half a decade ago. On Friday, six hours after I say good-bye to Halley at Burlington, I report to Joint Base Coronado, the main Fleet base on the West Coast and home to the fleet’s Special Operations Command. I spend the whole Saturday getting laser-measured and hooked up to various diagnostic systems, and the fitted suit is ready for me by Sunday afternoon.
“That took no time at all,” I say to the supply specialist when I put on the suit for the postfitting testing and calibration. “Last time they didn’t have the suit ready for a week.”
“What happened to it?” the tech asks.
“Burned up with Manitoba at Sirius A.”
“Wow. You were there? Not too many guys came back from that one.”
“No, they didn’t,” I say.
“Yeah, we have way more suits than people who are qualified to wear them,” the tech says. “We fitted more this week than we did all year, but you’re only number seven.”