Terms of Enlistment 01.2: Measures of Absolution (2 page)

She doesn’t feel like eating at all, but her stomach reminds her that she hasn’t had any food since before last night’s combat drop, so Jackson walks over to the chow hall for lunch. For the first time, nobody from her squad sits down with her at the table. She pokes around in her lunch—spaghetti and meatballs—and gets her PDP out of her pocket to read up on the battalion news while she eats. There isn’t a word about last night’s clusterfuck. The battalion S is probably still trying to figure out how to package the events in terms that don’t make it look like the brass screwed the pooch. Like the grunts don’t talk.

The dog tags from last night are in her pocket now. Jackson takes them out and puts them on the mess table in front of her, next to her plate of spaghetti. Then she enters the name on those tags into her PDP and runs a MilNet data search.

It takes a lot of digging to find any references to her MCKENNEY A in the archives.  Jackson has no access to the personnel files anywhere, so she can't just punch in the military serial number on the tag and pull up a name.  Instead, she has to do full-text searches on all the open databases on the MilNet--all the sanitized press releases for public consumption, and the thousands of individual unit news nodes updated by the data entry clerks in every autonomous unit in the Armed Forces.

After thirty minutes of increasingly customized searches on increasingly obscure data repositories, her spaghetti and meatballs are cold, but she finally finds a reference to a Navy sailor named  MCKENNEY, ANNA K.  It pops up in a reference to an awards ceremony, and she instructs her PDP to ferret out the related file.  A few seconds later, her PDP returns an article from a base news bulletin, titled TWO RECEIVE NAVY COMMENDATION MEDAL ON NACS CATALINA.  There are pictures of the event attached to the file, and the second one she pulls up makes her sit up straight in her chair with a jolt.

The picture shows two sailors shaking hands with a Fleet officer, presumably their commander.  The sailor in the middle is the woman she shot last night in Detroit.  In the picture, her long hair is neatly tied into a braid, and she's wearing a Class A Navy smock with petty officer chevrons on her sleeve.

She looks at the picture for a while.  She tries to imagine what her voice sounded like, or what her smile looked like.

Petty Officers Third Class Anna McKenney and Pete Willis accept their Navy Commendation Medals from their Commanding Officer, Lieutenant Commander Alan Carreker,
the caption of the picture reads.

Anna McKenney will never age past the way she looks in that picture.  All that's left of her is the collection of bytes that make up this picture in some forgotten nook of the MilNet, and the stamped steel tag on the table in front of Jackson.

The article lists Petty Officer McKenney's home town as Liberty Falls, Vermont.  A quick cross-reference with MilNet tells Jackson that Liberty Falls is a small city near the state capital Montpelier.  Its population is only thirty thousand, which is a shockingly low number to her.  There are more residents than that in any five blocks of tenement buildings of any PRC.

When the military lists a soldier's hometown, they always mean the place of enlistment.  Corporal Jackson very much doubts that Anna McKenney traveled all the way to that little Vermont town just to visit a recruitment office, and she’s willing to bet that some people in Liberty Falls still remember her name.

Chapter Three

Liberty

Don't make me find you some bullshit job," Sergeant Sobieski says when Corporal Jackson walks into his office and renders a salute.  The platoon sergeant is a stocky man with a graying buzzcut and a permanent frown on his face.

"Negative, sir.  I came to check if I can get a few days of leave.  Since I am limited to bullshit jobs right now anyway."

Sergeant Sobieski looks at her, his frown increasing in severity as he undoubtedly ponders whether to consider her repetition of his swear word as borderline insubordination.  Then he raises an eyebrow.

"Leave?  What the hell you going to do with that, Jackson?  Got yourself a civvie boyfriend in town?"

"That's a negative, sir. I feel the need for some fresh air all of a sudden.”

Sergeant Sobieski studies her face for a moment, his own expression sour as always.  Then he shakes his head and sits down behind his desk.

“I sure as shit can’t use you for anything before Battalion gets around to your psych eval and lets you near a gun again.”

He consults the MilNet terminal on his desk.

"You got five days accrued, Jackson.  You want to take 'em?"

"If it's okay with the platoon, sir."

Sergeant Sobieski hacks away at the keyboard with two fingers, an activity he clearly finds distasteful.  Then he taps a button on his terminal's touchscreen and leans back in his chair.

"I'm the platoon right now, Miss Jackson, and I don't care.  God knows you've all earned a few days of drinking and whoring around for that clusterfuck in Detroit.  Go over to the company clerk and give him the dates you want for your leave."

"Thank you, sir," she says and salutes again.

"Now get out and stop bugging me," the Sergeant says as he returns her salute casually.

The next morning, Jackson puts on her little-used Class A uniform instead of the far more comfortable ICUs.  She’d much rather wear the fatigues—the Class A looks a lot more presentable, but feels a lot more stifling—but she obeys the regulations and puts on the dress smock.

After breakfast, she walks across the base to the aviation section.  A soldier on leave can hitch a ride on military transports, provided they have a free jump seat in the cargo hold.  Some soldiers spend a good chunk of their leave waiting for rides, but Jackson has no problems getting a sear on an eastbound transport shuttle right away.

She spends the morning hopping across the eastern half of the continent on a succession of shuttles.  Finally, after stops at TA bases in Kentucky, the Chicago metroplex, and upstate New York, she finds herself at Burlington, a small TA air base on the shore of Lake Champlain. The base has a public transportation link right in front of the main gate. 

As a soldier, Jackson gets certain perks in the civilian world.  She can eat at any government facility with a chow room—military bases, public administration centers, transit worker canteens.  She can also ride the maglev system for free just by scanning her military ID in place of a regular ticket.

She walks into the terminal building, past the uniformed security guards at the door.  Her TA smock gets her respectful nods.  She has no doubt that coming up here in her old, ratty civilian clothes would have meant a security inspection and on-the-spot interview instead, to make sure she has a good reason for being up here, and a form of payment sufficient for a maglev ticket. She pulls a ticket with her ID and gets on the regional maglev to Liberty Falls, just ten minutes away.

The town is clean, tidy, middle-class. No high rises anywhere in sight to spoil the view of the Green Mountains which surround the town. It looks like a different world from Dayton, never mind Detroit.

Jackson came to Liberty Falls with only a last name for a lead.  The military-issue PDP in the pocket of her uniform trousers only talks to the MilNet, which doesn't interact with any of the civvie data networks.  She can check obscure news from backwater TA units, or look up any number of regulations and manuals, but the PDP won't let her so much as bring up a schedule for the hydrobuses berthed outside the transit station.  She’s almost ready to ask a local to borrow their personal datapad for a moment and rely on the respectability her uniform seems to convey in this middle-class enclave, when she sees a public library up ahead at the corner of the green.

The library has public-access data terminals.  She walks in, sit down in front of one, and brings up the public and private Networks directories.  There are eight Net nodes in Liberty Falls belonging to people with the last name of MCKENNEY.

She half expects the search for the right McKenneys to require canvassing every address on the list of names she just brought up, but in the end, the resolution is quick and simple.  She plugs Anna McKenney's full name into the heuristic search to see what comes back.  The data terminal blinks for second, and then spits out four screens of search results.  Jackson opens a few to see if they refer to the right person, and the very first hit is her yearbook entry from her school, Miguel Alcubierre Polytechnic Public High School.  The girl in the picture is unmistakably a young version of the woman in the image of the military awards ceremony Jackson has saved on her PDP.  She never got a long look at Anna McKenney's face back in Detroit, but she has had plenty of time to study her picture since she unearthed it on her PDP back in the chow hall yesterday.  There are many more references to her in the public news repositories filed away for posterity, and after a few more minutes of digging, Jackson finds the name of her parents, embedded in a  picture of the proud family at Anna’s graduation from Alcubierre Polytech back in 2188.

ANNA MCKENNEY, CLASS OF '88, AND HER PARENTS, JENNIFER AND ROBERT MCKENNEY.

She checks the list of addresses she pulled from the public directories and sees the entry for MCKENNEY ROBERT & JENNIFER near the bottom of the list.  They are on a private network, Datapoint, but their listing isn't locked, and their Net node number is followed by their street address: 4408 Copley Circle, Liberty Falls, NAC/VT/056593.

It's only when she looks at the address of the parents of the woman she killed when she realizes that part of her wanted to come up empty, to hit a dead end out here in suburban Vermont, and go home to Shughart with an excuse to stop digging.  Now, with the address right in front of her, she no longer has the option to return to the way things were before Detroit, no way to rationalize keeping herself in the dark.

According to the city map, Copley Circle is a street in a residential neighborhood two kilometers from the library.  Jackson transcribes the directions to the notepad on her PDP, does a hard reset of the terminal to clear all the screens, and leaves the library to go and maybe find a measure of absolution.

Chapter Four

Vermont

Copley Circle is a neat neighborhood.  The houses are small, but there's space between them, and they all have little front yards with patches of artificial grass.  The uniformity of the neighborhood reminds Jackson of a military base, rows of largely identical buildings lined up like a TA company at Morning Orders.  There are hydrocars parked in front of many houses--personal transportation, an almost inconceivable luxury in a PRC.

4408 Copley Circle sits at the end of a long cul-de-sac.  Out here, there are air filtration units in the windows as well, but as Jackson steps into the walkway that leads from the road to the front door of number 4408, she notices that their environmental unit isn't even running. The air is so clean out here.

She presses the button for the doorbell, and once again, she feels a bit of hope flaring up--hope to have her ring unanswered, hope that the McKenneys are out to visit friends for the day, or down in the clean air of Panama for the season, so she can turn around and get back onto the train to Burlington with a somewhat intact conscience.  Then she hears the sound of footsteps inside.

The door opens, and Jackson finds herself face to face with a tall man who looks to be in his sixties.  He has thinning red hair that's gray in many spots, and the soft-edged look of a government employee, someone who has regular access to something other than soy patties and recycled sewage.  They look at each other for a moment, and he studies her uniform with an expression of mild distaste on his face.

"How can I help you?" he asks, in a tone that makes clear that he rather wouldn't.  Jackson takes a deep breath, and then finds that she has no idea what to say to the man whose daughter she killed two days ago.

"My name is Corporal Kameelah Jackson,” she says.  "Are you Anna McKenney's father?"

He looks past her briefly, as if he expected more people to have come with her.  Then his gaze flicks back to Jackson—or rather, her uniform.

"You're not on official business," he says, and it's a statement rather than a question.  "They'd never send just a junior NCO all by herself.”

"No, sir.  I'm here on my own."

"I was hoping I'd never see another one of those fucking uniforms for the rest of my days," he says.  The swear word comes out as if he doesn't use it very often.  "What do you want?"

"I wanted to talk to you about Anna,” she replies.

He looks at her for a long moment, the distaste still etched in his face. Then he purses his lips and opens the door a little wider.

"Well, come inside before you let all the bad air in.  And wipe those awful boots."

The table in the dining room has two sets of used dishes on it.  Mr. McKenney pulls out a chair and motions for her to sit down before picking off the dirty plates and carrying them off.  She takes the seat and looks around in the dining room. There are framed prints on the walls, black-and-white photographs of untouched landscapes long gone. There's a little china cabinet in a corner of the dining room, and a small collection of framed pictures on top of it.  Jackson recognizes Anna McKenney in numerous stages of her life--basic school, polytech, proud college grad adorned with the obligatory gown and cap.  From the lack of other children in that little picture shrine, she deduces that Anna was an only child, which makes the dread she feels even worse.

"You're not one of Annie’s buddies," Mr. McKenney states matter-of-factly when he returns from the kitchen, holding two brown plastic bottles in his hands.  As he sits down in the chair across the table from her, he pushes one of the bottles across the polished laminate.  She picks it up and sniffs the open mouth of the bottle.

"It's just beer," he says.  "You can have one, since you're not on official business."