In the Valley (17 page)

Whitehead looked at him for just a bit longer. “Well, Trooper Thompson, you are well past your majority, and you’ve made a decision. And yes, Ottawa 6 is as nice a world as you are going to find. Please sign this.” A separation document showed up in Paul’s visual. He clicked on it, looked it over, and digitally signed.

“OK, you’ve made the call to get out,” Whitehead continued. “I respect that; you’ve served the federation well and honorably. Now, here’s the next thing, and I won’t allow you to answer today. In fact, I won’t see you for a week because you are on block leave as of today.” He peered at Paul and linked his hands behind his head.

“I want you to think—really think—about throwing away your chance to return to Earth. Don’t. Do. It. I’m giving you a week to think about it. Return here next week today, same time, and either accept a trip home or opt to stay here. It’s your call.” Paul just stood there. A whole week’s block leave? Just to think? What the hell? “Don’t just stand there, Thompson. I said to leave and think. What—would you rather polish latrine knobs?”

Paul was gone in a flash. In somewhat less time than that, he was off into Hope to see Darlene. Of course, Paul didn’t do a whole lot of thinking for the
next week. He was too busy for that. When he did go back to Sergeant First’s office, he signed the waiver for his return ticket.

Sergeant First Whitehead sighed, and then he countersigned the halo document. Whether he was ready or not, Paul was about to become a resident of the city of Hope, Ottawa 6.

Five months later, Paul was thinking maybe he had made a mistake. He had landed a job in the Purplewood forest trimming trees and was generally working his tail off. Yeah, he made an OK amount of creds, but the work was ball busting for seemingly little reward.

And most disturbingly, Darlene kept putting off the date of their marriage. Paul was paying for their little place out in Sunnyside, north of Hope, and Darlene seemed to leave for a couple of days each week to go to her parents’ place.

She kept saying that she wanted to go to school to be a hairstylist, but there never seemed to be enough money. Also, Paul usually came home dead tired after a day of trimming trees, so the romance had dropped off a bit, as well.

Before Paul had gotten out of the service, it seemed they almost never fought. Now it seemed like they fought more often than not.

Paul loved Darlene’s fiery red hair, but sometimes the disposition that came with the hair (or so old wives’ tales had it) wore on him.

The fateful day was no different. Paul had just worked overtime and was looking forward to a nice hot bath to ease his aches and pains, and a beer. As soon as he came home, he knew something was off.

Darlene’s parents’ ground-car was sitting in front of his and Darlene’s apartment. Paul wondered what was up. Her folks almost never came out to their little place. Paul walked up the little set of steps into the apartment and walked in the door.

Darlene was sitting there, her eyes all puffy and red from crying. Her mother, a shrew of a woman with pinched features and dishwater hair, spoke up. “Well, look what the cat dragged in.” It was definitely not said in a nice tone of voice.

“What’s going on, Darlene?” Paul asked, poleaxed by the situation.

Her mom spoke up. “You haven’t been treating my daughter right, and I’m taking her home.”

Darlene continued to stare at the floor. Paul looked out the window and noticed that the ground-car was piled with her stuff.

“What the hell is this?” Paul tried to keep his voice down but was failing. “Darlene, are you going to let your mom do all the speaking for you? What have you been telling her?”

“She’s told me enough, young man, and right now, you need to get out of the way. We’re leaving.” Darlene’s mom grabbed her by the arm and pulled her up. Darlene kept her eyes on the floor and started to move toward the door. Paul knew better than to grab her and beg her to stay, to demand of her that she tell him what the problem was. In the mood her mom was in, the police would be at the house so fast his head would spin, and then there’d really be trouble. Paul still didn’t know why this was happening. There must have been a lot said when Paul was at work that didn’t make it to his ears or to his halo.

As the two ladies left, Paul yelled at their backs, “Darlene, wait! Are you going to let your mother run your life? Aren’t you going to say two words to me?”

Darlene paused, turned, and looked at him for the first time since he’d come home. Her face was twisted in a sneer.

“Two words: Good. Bye.”

With that, the mother and her daughter got into the ground-car and left, gone from Paul’s life.

Paul sat down on the front steps and watched their ground-car recede in the distance, on the dead-straight road that led to Hope. After half a kilometer, the car disappeared behind a stand of Purplewoods.

Paul was stuck on Ottawa 6 with nothing to show for it. He proceeded to fall apart, right there on the steps.

P
aul was getting edgier by the day, here in his fifth month on Juneau 3. He walked up some steps leading into a village. Second Company was engaged in a “hammer-and-anvil” sweep of one of the villages in the Belt.

The tactics behind this sweep were as simple as a stone. The colonel, on the eastern side of the Zudnok River, was sitting there in his suit with First and Third Companies. The companies across the river formed a blocking force: the “anvil” of the hammer-and-anvil metaphor.

On the western side of the river, encircling several villages, was a mixed force of provincial police and Second Company, sweeping on-line through the villages toward the river. This mixed force was the “hammer.” The objective was to flush dissidents into movement, where one force or the other would crush them.

So far, there had been mixed results, according to the data Paul’s halo had given them. Along several fording spots on the river, Juneau forces had picked up some squirters and were questioning them. But there hadn’t been any shooting yet.

Paul and his men kept moving toward the river, through villages, rice and cotton fields, and scrubby brush. Once again, Paul and Z were moving unarmored. Before dawn, Second Company’s ground-cars had brought the force to
the western road and dropped them off. The men lined up abreast on the road and began to sweep toward the Zudnok River in the east.

Paul was expecting a firefight to break out at any moment. He kept constantly checking his micro feed, courtesy of the colonel, and examining their relative positions.

As they approached a village that only had a number on his halo feed, “6,” he felt as if a pall of menace had descended on him and his crew. With every step closer to the village in front of them, he waited for the shot that would ring out, the bomb that would explode, the antiarmor rocket that would announce its presence with two booms: one boom for the firing, the second boom for whatever it hit.

The crude antiarmor rocket they made locally here on Juneau was a copy of an Old Earth design—the weapon looked like a joke. If it was a joke, however, it wasn’t funny. The launcher was an ugly thing that looked like a pipe with a glued-on trigger mechanism. Its reloadable warhead was a bulbous-shaped charge that incinerated whatever it hit.

Of course, it had been Paul’s experience that the things were pretty inaccurate. But compared to its effect on target, that was small consolation. Yeah, an armored infantryman might be hard to hit, but the ugly pipe thing would kill a suited soldier with a solid hit. Therefore, the local antiarmor pipe was a weapon to be feared. For an unarmored soldier like Paul, that applied doubly.

Trauma-weave cams or not, Paul felt naked approaching the village. As he passed by a row of dinosaur trees in front of the collection of walled compounds, Paul heard a vicious barking up ahead.

Z-man pinged him. “Oh man, sir, I hope them dogs are tied up. I fuckin’ hate dogs.”

“Shut up, Z, and keep station,” Paul shot back. He didn’t need bullshit distractions when approaching a hostile village that could be full of bad guys. Checking his halo, Paul saw that Z-man was where he should be, to Paul’s rear and left, about five meters back. Bashir was to Paul’s right, and he was keeping his guys more or less in on-line formation via halo link.

Even the civvy halos Bashir’s guys were using were good for this type of work. So far, the Juneau Army had been issued few of the mil-grade sets. FORSCOMJUN was rightfully apprehensive that if they widely issued the mil-grade sets, the halos would end up in the hands of the dissidents in short order.

With what Paul had seen so far, he agreed with FORSCOMJUN. Every piece of equipment that was entrusted to the Juneaus seemed to walk with Jesus, sooner or later.

Paul concentrated again on the job at hand. They were only about fifty meters from the village. The village wall had three openings facing the approaching Second Company. Bashir designated a couple of soldiers to stay behind for rear security, and a platoon each would enter through the gaps in the village wall.

Paul stayed with Bashir, who had chosen to enter through the central gap. The barking of the dogs reached a fever pitch. Paul heard people yelling at the dogs; they quieted down a little.

As Paul went through the gap in the wall, he held his rifle at the ready and flowed through quickly. Z-man did the same.

A gap in a wall, a doorway, or any other feature people use to gain entrance to a structure is known as a “fatal funnel.” It’s easy for a person waiting on the other side to shoot people as they come through the gap, door, or window. A lesson learned by Paul long ago: never stop in a fatal funnel. As soon as Paul cleared the gap in the wall, he knew his chances of being hit went down a little.

There was nothing like coming up on a hostile village to get the heart racing, to get the cottonmouth feeling going. Paul’s “fun meter” was close to pegging out. Bashir’s men moved to dominate the strong points on the village streets. It was eerily quiet within the town. A quick search ensued. Paul and Bashir hung out by a dinosaur tree along the village street; his men found nothing, and there were no squirters by their location.

Within twenty minutes, the village was tentatively cleared, and via halo link Second Company started to move out of the village back toward the river. Bashir and Paul worked to get the men back on-line while the provincial police behind them occupied the just-cleared village for a more thorough search. Paul and Z-man moved behind Bashir while the company sorted itself back out. They were moving along a low wall and a drainage ditch filled with a sludgy-looking effluent.

As the company moved forward, Paul temporarily lost Z from his halo feed. Paul and Bashir were trying to hammer out a problem with Third Platoon’s progress through a cotton field on the eastern side of the village. Apparently Third Platoon’s lieutenant was telling Bashir that his men were tired; they wanted to sit down and rest and bum some tea off of the villagers.

Paul was in the midst of telling Bashir why Third Platoon’s idea was a bad concept when—
pop popopop braap pop!
—the fii ring started going off to Paul’s rear.

Immediately Paul crouched behind a dike, along with Bashir and some other guys. Everyone’s head was on a swivel, looking for the source of fire. Paul pulled up the halo micro feed and looked for the shooter. It was party time, again.

The halo feed identified a certain Sergeant Z as the shooter and the casualty as a dog. Paul looked up and rolled his eyes. Bashir, crouching next to him, shook his head.

What the fuck—over, Paul thought.

On cue, Z came walking toward the two men, hanging his head. Even better, the colonel and Mike’s icons came on simultaneously. Paul took the colonel’s query first and slaved it to Mike as well.

“OK, Two-Three, what’s up? Are you in contact?”

Paul shook his head. “No, Five, I thought so for a minute, but it looks like Sergeant Z, Two-Three Mike, shot a dog.”

Mike’s face appeared next to the colonel’s. He was wearing an incredulous expression. “He shot a what?”

Paul answered back, “A dog—reason unknown.”

The colonel’s face in Paul’s view screen had that expression the colonel would always get when he wanted a better explanation: eyebrows raised, chin jutted forward, eyes wide open.

“Sir, I’ll get back with you on this.”

“Check, Two-Three.” And the colonel signed off.

Mike drawled, “Yeah, roger, Two-Three. Can’t wait to hear the story. Call back when you’ve killed someone.” With a chagrined expression and a shaking head, Mike signed off.

Second Company, once the dust had cleared from the dog-killing episode, had shaken itself back out and continued toward the river. Paul and Z-man walked with them.

Paul called Z forward for an off-halo chat. “OK, Z, what the fuck was that? Why did you waste that dog?”

Z was looking jittery, his eyes, like Paul’s, were continually scanning things while they advanced with Second Company. “That fuckin’ dog attacked me. Be damned if I get chewed on by some dog. I fuckin’ hate dogs.” Z was adamant.

“OK, it attacked you, but did you have to put a magazine into it? We all thought we were in another firefight, you stupid fuck!” Paul was hot; the adrenaline from what had appeared to be another firefight was only now edging just a little downward. And after all, they were still on a sweep while conducting this little counseling session.