Terms of Enlistment 01.2: Measures of Absolution (3 page)

"Thank you."

She takes a sip and lets the liquid trickle over her tongue.  She’s never been much of a beer drinker--hard liquor is much more cost-effective for welfare rats, and much easier to make in large batches--but the bitter flavor of the cold beer is pleasing after the long walk in the warm sun.

"How do you know I'm not?" ask him.

He nods at her uniform and points at the green beret with the Infantry badge tucked underneath the left shoulder board of my jacket.

“You’re TA.  Annie was Navy. Military Police."

Jackson doesn't know how to interpret his use of the past tense, and she doesn't have a way of clarifying his statement without playing her own hand, so she just shrugs.

"So what do you want?" Mr. McKenney says.  "If she owes you anything, you've come to the wrong place.  She hasn't been home in two years.  I haven't even talked to her on vid in a month or two."

"It's nothing like that," she says.  She takes refuge in action and pulls the dog tag out of her pocket. She puts the tag in front of Mr. McKenney, and he glances at it for a moment before picking it up.  Jackson watches as he turns the worn steel tag between his fingers slowly.

"Where'd you get this?" he says after a few moments.  "I didn't even know she still had hers."

She could tell him that she yanked the tag off his daughter's neck after she shot her dead, two days ago and almost two thousand miles away.  She has come all the way from Shughart to deliver that battered little piece of sheet steel, and maybe find a measure of absolution in the process.  She doesn’t feel shame for having killed Anna McKenney--she tried to kill Jackson’s squad mate, after all. Jackson is sorry she had to kill her, this man's only child, but she’s not ashamed, because she did what she had to do to save Grayson’s life.  When she came here, she fully intended to come clean and tell her parents what happened to their daughter that night in Detroit, and that she won't ever come home again.  Now that she’s sitting here, across the table from the man who changed Anna McKenney's diapers when she was little, the man who probably taught her to ride a bike and tie her own shoelaces, she just can't bring up the courage to face his reaction.

"I found it," she tells Mr. McKenney instead.  "On the street, in Detroit, a week and a half ago."

He shifts his gaze from the tag in his hand to her, and then back to the tag.

"Is there more to that story, or an I supposed to believe you came all the way out here just to return this thing?"

"No, I didn't," she admits.

"Didn't think so.  Where are you stationed, anyway?"

"Shughart, sir.  It's just outside of Dayton, Ohio."

"That's a pretty long way from Detroit."

"We were on a call.  Didn't you hear about it on the Networks?"

Mr. McKenney raises an eyebrow.

"Hear about what?"

"We were called in to put out a welfare riot," she says.  “”Broke a bunch of stuff.”

“I haven't heard squat about that.  There hasn't been a big welfare riot since Miami last year, and they say the Chinks started that one."

"Well," Jackson says, "I can assure you there was one, because we were right in the middle of it."

"Anyone get killed?"

She instantly recalls the dozens of bodies strewn in front of her squad's position after they opened fire on the surging crowd that had seemed determined to kill them with their bare hands.  She remembers Stratton and Paterson, cut down in an instant by heavy weapons fire, and crumpling to the pavement like carelessly tossed duffel bags.  She thinks of the apartment building Grayson demolished with a MARS rocket.  She has no idea how many civvies their TA company killed that night, but if the other squads were only half as busy as theirs, they filled a lot of body bags.

"Yeah," she replies.  "A few people got killed.  You mean it wasn't in the news at all?"

"They don't usually advertise it when they send you people in to beat up on some welfare rabble," Mr. McKenney says.  "Can't blame 'em, really.  People might get the impression that the civil authorities can't control the PRCs."

She opens her mouth to tell him that they were the ones who took the beating that night--eight troopers dead, one drop ship lost, and dozens of wounded--but when she reconsiders the equation, it seems like she’s about to complain of bruised knuckles after having beaten someone to death.  They may have had a rough time on the ground, but the squad dished out much more hurt than they took.

"'You people'," she repeats.  "You don't care much for the military, do you?"

"Sure I do," he replies.  "The real military.  The Marines, up there."  He gestures to the ceiling.  "The ones that keep the Chinks and the Russians from kicking us off our colonies.  You people," he says again, and nods at Jackson’s uniform, "you're not military.  You're just cops with bigger guns, nicer uniforms, and less oversight."

"Your daughter was Navy,” she points out, and she’s briefly satisfied by the hint of pain in his face.

"Yes, she was," he says.  "I could have gotten her in with the Commonwealth, a nice shot at a public career.  And she has to go off and play sailor. I tried to get Annie to resign, but those contracts you sign, they're one-way tickets. She served out her first enlistment, and she took the money and got the hell out, like anyone with half a brain would."

He puts down his bottle and picks up his daughter's dog tag again.  Jackson watches as he slowly turns it between his fingers, rubbing his thumb over the raised letters of his daughter's name and service number.  She knows what would be going through her head in his place, and she wants to avoid having to answer the question he's bound to ask sooner or later, so she seizes the initiative again.

"Do you know where I can find her?"

He looks at her and chuckles.  It sounds like a stifled cough, entirely without humor.

"Like I'd tell
you
," he says.  "For all I know, you're a lieutenant with Intel, and they just put you in a corporal’s uniform to go and sniff around.  What do you want from my daughter, anyway?"

"I don't really know," she admits.  "Well, for starters, I'm pretty sure she was shooting at me, and I'd like to find out what the hell was going on that night."

"She was, huh?"

"Half the city was.  Lots of them had military weapons.  They shot down one of our drop ships."

"Are you sure you should be telling me that stuff?" Mr. McKenney says.  "I'm not sure I want to know about that.  If they don't want to see it on the Networks, you probably shouldn't be talking to me about it, don't you think?"

"I don't think I give much of a shit, sir.  No offense," she adds when he looks at her in surprise.  "I want to know what the hell was going on that night.”

"Now that's interesting," Mr. McKenney says.  "A TA soldier who wants to know why they send her out to shoot people."

She’s getting tired of his hostility, and for a moment she considers coming clean, just to see the amused smugness on his face disappear.  Then she gets a hold of her emotions and pushes the chair away from the table to get up.

"I'm sorry I bothered you," she says.  "I guess I ought to be going.  Thanks for the beer."

"Oh, sit down and relax," he replies and gets up from his own chair.  "You're going to have a thicker skin than that if you want to make it to retirement.  The government is full of cranky old jerks like me."

He walks off again, in an unhurried gait.  Jackson studies the silk-screened label of her beer bottle while Mr. McKenney rummages around in a drawer in the next room.  Then he walks back into the dining room, an old-fashioned paper notebook in his hand.

"I don't have an address for her, just a node number.  You can try to get in touch with her yourself.  My guess is that she won't be interested in talking to you, but who knows?"

He leafs around in his little notebook for a few moments, and then puts the open book in front of her, his finger pointing to a handwritten Net node address.  The rest of the page is filled with notes, written in blue ink, in a neat cursive hand.

"That's the number she gave me last time I talked to her.  I'm pretty sure it's someone else's node.  Annie's just been sort of drifting from place to place since she got out of the military."

Jackson pulls out her PDP and transcribes the node address into the notepad.

"Thank you."

"You may want to be careful with that," he says.  "If there's something going on the government wants to keep a lid on, they'll sic military intel on you if they notice you poking around."

She shrugs noncommittally and slips the PDP back into my pocket.

"I'm just a corporal on leave," she says.  "With thirty-four months left to go on my contract.  They own me one way or the other, right?"

Mr. McKenney closes his little notebook again and puts it next to his daughter's dog tag on the dining room table.

"Yes, they do.  But if you're not careful, you'll get to spend those thirty-odd months in the brig, and you won't get that bank account in the end.  Imagine, all that sweating and bleeding and killing for absolutely nothing."

It's a short walk from the front door to the curb of the public road.  Mr. McKenney escorts her across his front yard, as if he wants to make sure she’s really leaving.

When they reach the curb, Jackson turns around.  Mr. McKenney has his hands tucked into the pockets of his trousers.  Now that he's standing in front of her in bright daylight, she notices a bit of a belly overlapping his belt.

"Thanks for your time," she says, and now he's the one shrugging noncommittally.

"I'm retired.  I have all day to waste."

Last chance,
she thinks to herself. 
Last chance to come clean and confess to this man that you killed his daughter, shot her through the chest with a salvo of flechette rounds, and put another burst right into her face for good measure.  Last chance to save this man from getting increasingly worried in the next weeks and months because his only child isn't calling him anymore.  Last chance to save yourself from adding just another missed opportunity to the list of regrets that will hang around your neck for the rest of your life.

She wants to extend her hand to say good-bye, but she doesn't want to give him the chance to refuse it.  Instead, she just nods and turns to walk away.

"Do me a favor, corporal,” he says, and she turns around again.

"If you get to talk to Annie, tell her to give her mother a call when she gets a chance."

"I'll let her know," Jackson says, and the shame of the lie tastes like bile in her mouth.

On her way back to the transit station, she stops at the library and claims a data terminal once more.  She takes out her PDP and enters the node number for Anna McKenney into a directory search to do a reverse lookup.

Anna McKenney's last Net node number is not on a private network, and it doesn't resolve to a physical address, just a unified pool of communication nodes.  All of them belong to a single party--the Greater Detroit Metropolitan Civil Administration.

Chapter Five

Taps

Jackson hasn’t taken a leave in almost two years. She has no family left to visit, and even if she did, they’d be in Atlanta-Macon, and she has no desire to return to that place in this lifetime. So she takes the maglev back to the Burlington base, which has a rec facility on the lakeshore. She spends two days eating, sleeping, and using the entertainment suites. By Day Three of her five-day leave, she is bored out of her mind, so she takes a shuttle back to Shughart. Better to report to duty early, even if it means having to count towels and clean optical sight modules, than to spend another day drinking shitty soy beer in front of a holoscreen.

When she walks back into the squad room, Priest and Baker are there, playing cards at the table.

“You two okay?” she asks.

“Yeah,” Priest says. He runs his finger across his forehead, where a thin, pale line marks a fused laceration. “Few dings here and there. Grayson and the Sarge got the worst of it.”

“Stratton and Paterson got the worst of it,” Jackson says. “What about Hansen?”

“Her shoulder joint is blown,” Baker says. “Three weeks rehab.”

“We’re on light duty,” Priest says and gets out of his chair. “Top says we’re off the line until the squad gets a debriefing and a psych eval.”

Of course, Jackson thinks. They’re not going to let us anywhere near a loaded gun until the shrinks and the Intelligence officers have cleared us.

“Top said you were on leave for the week,” Baker says.

“I was,” she says. “Cut it short. Ain’t shit to do out there.”

“So what do we do now?”

Jackson opens her locker and takes out her knife and a sharpening stone. Then she walks over to the table and sits down in the chair Priest just vacated.

“We get the edge back on,” she says. “Downtime ain’t gonna last forever.”

She gets her medical clearance the next morning. One of the resident TA MedCorps docs looks Jackson over, checks the medical data from her armor, and pronounces her physically fit for unrestricted duty, as if she couldn’t have determined that by herself. The psych eval and Intel debriefing are equally superficial and cursory, standard “how does that make you feel?” psychobabble bullshit, some half-trained shrink checking off boxes on a form. She gives him the answers she knows will let him make his marks in the right spots.

The Intel debriefing doesn’t even have any sort of point. Her helmet camera captured everything much more reliably than her memory did.

“Forty-three,” the battalion’s intel officer tells her at the debriefing.

“Excuse me, sir?”

“Forty-three kills,” he says. “Your tally for Detroit. All good kills on armed hostiles. You did well.”

Is that supposed to make her feel better, give her pride or a sense of accomplishment? Lighten her conscience, maybe? If anything, it has the opposite effect. Those were not soldiers of a foreign army. They were welfare rats, with no armor and mostly antique weapons. They may have come out on top because it was a thousand of them against four squads, but they paid dearly for their victory if the rest of the company had kill counts anything like Jackson’s. Next time the TA goes in, there’ll be more of them and they’ll be much more determined, because now they know they can win. They almost got a drop ship with a full armory and loaded ordnance racks. Jackson has no doubt they’ll try again. She would.