In the Valley (13 page)

Paul thought that somewhere there had to be a sign:
ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER
. A couple of hundred soldiers and sailors milled around: the veterans with rank pips were staying off in their own little groups; recruits found a hard chair to sleep on or were busy gambling on the floor.

Paul really didn’t feel like making acquaintance with anyone as of yet. First, it was apparent that the shuttles would make a couple of stops to ships parked in geosynchronous orbit, and a lot of the guys and gals here were going to be on different ships. Also, Paul figured that whoever was on his ship would become familiar to him all too soon.

Of the estimated 270 days’ transit time that Paul’s orders claimed it would take him to reach Ottawa 6, almost all of it was subluminal travel out of and into the gravity wells of the two respective systems, Sol and Ottawa.

The Glimmer drive wormhole transition was nearly instantaneous, from what he had been briefed, so it took hardly any transit time.

So he figured he’d be cooped up awhile with at least some of these people. Might as well catch up on some shut-eye, he figured. He spotted a likely bench and popped a squat. Eventually, he fell into a fitful sleep.

He was awoken by a Klaxon horn and an announcement. “All passengers for the FSS
Merton R. Johnson
are directed at this time to take your luggage to the ADAG counter for stowage aboard transport. All passengers ranks E1 through E4 will report…” The announcement droned on and on. Paul caught the bit about “boarding” and “luggage” and shouldered his bags to the ADAG counter, wondering what the hell ADAG meant anyway.

After a wait in the line that seemed to go on forever, Paul finally deposited his duffel and personal-effects bags on the scale. The fat, unpleasant military clerk at the desk gave the scale readout the fish eye, but Paul was underweight, so the clerk just grunted. A halo icon popped up in his visual, and it said, “
EMBARKATION INSTRUCTIONS
.” Paul got out of the way of the next guy in line and took a look at his newest icon and groaned.

Apparently the part of the announcement he missed, about the E1–E4 (junior enlisted) personnel, meant that he had some work to do. He shuffled over to the steadily growing group of soldiers by the luggage gate. They had to palletize everyone’s bags under the supervision of an air terminal guy. Two sweaty hours later, after stacking bags and securing them with nets, the job was done.

Paul was released to wait some more. He spent his final hours on Earth looking at clouds, wondering if this was to be the last time he saw Old Earth. When the passengers finally boarded the bulbous gray shape that was their transport, Paul felt nothing but relief. He was finally headed to space.

Three months later, Paul was really regretting stepping onto the shuttle that fateful day. The cattle-chute nature of Departure Hold back on Gutierrez made more sense to him by the day.

At first, going to the ship’s junior-enlisted “relaxation lounge” was fun. There was a view port there, and Paul liked to go after his duty hours and stare at it. The number and color of the stars to be seen from the lounge was amazing for a while. If one wished, a direct halo feed would seemingly put you out into the center of space, along the exact track of the ship. It was awesome, in the old-fashioned Biblical sense of the word.

The feeling of awe at space travel wore off pretty quick, though, and was replaced with loneliness and boredom. It turned out the
Merton R. Johnson
had been named after some poor private who had killed a bunch of Chinese during one of Old Earth’s endless wars. That ancient trooper would surely have known all about the busywork handed out as the force’s solution for his feelings of boredom, of course. As the saying went, “Idle hands do the devil’s work.”

So Paul and his fellow passengers had a series of duties that ate away at the shipboard day. He was woken up at 0530 shipboard time and given fifteen minutes for ablutions. Then it was time for one hour of physical training, a half hour of calisthenics and weight training, and a half hour of running along the
ship’s slowly spinning outer wall. All activities were monitored by a senior NCO via halo link, of course.

Then came breakfast, which was unusually good. It certainly wasn’t the force swill Paul had had in training at Sill. After breakfast, there were about three hours of details, cleaning this or that in the ship. Then there was lunch call, which was broken up into three shifts for the junior enlisted.

First shift was ship’s complement. (Paul and his force friends thought the sailors got the best chow, of course.) Second shift was navy in transit. Finally, they bothered to feed the grunts in the hold, which only served to reinforce the perception that the navy got first pick.

In ship’s afternoon, Paul and the other armored infantry types had remedial halo training on any number of topics: suit maintenance, consideration of others, on-world finance, and so forth. It got old, but it did pass the time.

And on the
Merton R. Johnson
, all they had was time. For three hours every ship’s night, the passengers were free to think, fornicate, or gamble—each according to his or her ability or desire. The junior-enlisted pax were quartered in a battleship-gray, open-bay hold in bunks stacked three high. For privacy, they frequently hung up blankets or ponchos to hide their time-passing activities.

In the ship’s artificial “night,” Paul frequently heard soft moans, arguments, or snoring. On a good night, Paul got to witness a fight. Sometimes those grew to the extent that the navy cops had to break them up; then Paul got to witness a free-for-all, followed by bleary-eyed NCOs coming down into the hold to chew everyone out.

At 136 ship’s days from Earth and past the orbit of the former planet Pluto, the ship transitioned and emerged from not-space into the Ottawa System, 153 light-years from Old Earth. Paul hadn’t felt a thing.

After the Glimmer transition, he couldn’t wait for the duty day to end. For at least 70 of the past 136 days, Paul hadn’t gone to the relaxation lounge at all,
the sight of stars and the occasional bright glow of a planet on halo feed or the view screen having lost all novelty to him.

But after the transition, he had to check it out—as soon as the stupid halo class on M-74 optics operation was done. It turned out that if you set the parallax just right on the ACOG scope of the rifle, you could see through women’s clothes.

Naw, not really, but Paul could dream, couldn’t he?

The faux instructor on the halo class paused and asked Paul to pay attention. The simulations were just a touch too good for Paul—you couldn’t even daydream properly! Of course, that just made it easier for the force to feed info to its recruits, as Paul well knew. Maybe one day the automatic range-finding function on the MkVIIb optic would save his life. Here’s hoping, anyway, thought Paul.

After the class, Paul went to the lounge to virtually bathe in the stars of another planetary system. He wasn’t the only one in the relaxation lounge; there were a number of other soldiers and sailors there, virtually sightseeing or staring at the view screen.

Here were stars native to a place where humanity was an interloper. Paul clicked on the “Ottawa System Stars” icon in his visual field, and he was seemingly hanging in space, dangling at the entrance to the Ottawa System. The constellations all seemed wrong to him. As he “turned” his head in the view, he found a bright blob labeled “Ottawa 6.”

The
6
in “Ottawa 6” meant sixth planet from Ottawa Prime, the star of this planetary system. It was a naming convention for planets that had started in the infancy of Glimmer travel, and humanity had stuck to it since. By that definition, Earth should be “Sol 3.” Of course, no one called Old Earth that. Only the planets of the diaspora had number tags.

In Paul’s visual of the stars, he could see all the various planets of the Ottawa system, except for Ottawa 2, which was occluded by Ottawa Prime. And looking around further, he finally found what he was looking for—the faint star at 184 degrees relative, called Sol Prime—the sun of Old Earth.

All of a sudden, Paul felt like crying. Sol was so dim—he was an eternity from home.

And he was only about 130 days from Ottawa 6.

T
hree months after entering into the counterinsurgency fight on Juneau 3, Paul was wishing that he was anywhere else but there. This was a fight where you looked into your enemy’s eyes as he lay dying. This was a fight where the enemy looked into your eyes and laughed and called you his “friend.”

The team was back on Camp Kill-a-Guy, waiting for a new round of missions to come down from Jade, the capitol of Juneau, or from Force Command Juneau (a.k.a.
FORSCOMJUN
).

Paul was sitting in a folding chair outside the team’s barracks building, a one-story, tan brick building with a watchtower nearby and protective basket barriers around it.

The barrier baskets were for occasional incoming mortar or, more commonly, rocket rounds. The local dissidents amused themselves by tossing their local 107 mm Sino-bloc knockoff rounds into the camp on the off chance they could send some infidels to a well-deserved hell.

Paul’s chair was situated on a cement patio over a drainage ditch, built to contain this region of Juneau 3’s occasional wild flash floods. Next to it was a crappy military tent with a picnic table underneath in the shade.

Paul preferred the green folding chair on the patio, in the sun. He reached into the sleeve pocket on his cams and produced a near-cig of his favorite local brand, Fortunate.
Fortunate
—Paul reflected on the name as he pulled out a slightly crinkled smoke.

He considered himself fortunate to be alive to enjoy this sunset, although he didn’t expect that to last. He lit the smoke and looked out to the mountain west of the camp. The mountain, more of a ridge, was huge, at least two thousand meters high, and in the late afternoon sunlight, it took on a purplish hue. Its colors changed, depending on the time of day that you looked at it.

He drew deeply from the near-cig and exhaled slowly, watching his smoke lazily curl up into the still afternoon air. He heard Crusty harangue Al-Asad out in the motor pool about some kind of crap; maybe Al-Asad hadn’t cleaned out their assigned ground-car well enough. Who knew?

Perhaps Crusty was simply pointing out to poor Al-Asad that in the 505th Sky-Falling Infantry, they hadn’t done suit maintenance the way Al-Asad had done it and that the poor young medic had to do it Crusty’s way. Or maybe the young trooper had done nothing at all wrong, and leather-faced Crusty was simply sounding off in his air-horn voice.

Once again, who knew, and who cared? Paul certainly didn’t. He took another drag off his smoke. He exhaled again, this time through his nose. He kept looking around, wanting to see any sight that would take his mind off the coming missions.

To the left from where Paul was sitting, across the motor pool, was another building. It was a tin shack tall enough to do ground-car maintenance in, but the team used it for supply. Dirty was in there at the moment; the door was open. Paul could hear him arguing with someone—probably Crest—about equipment.

“You stupid fucker; you don’t know anything about heavy repeaters,” came a Chicago-accented voice. Yup, that was Crest again, beating his head up against
the wall of Dirty’s slime-slick defenses. It was a waste of time; Paul knew for sure. He had known guys like Dirty his whole career; you had to handle them carefully. They were like kids’ paste—the harder you grabbed them, the more they oozed through your fingers.

Paul was enjoying this afternoon moment. He had taken care of his suit and weapons, and Z-man was busy inventorying medical equipment with Stork. Ha-ha, he thought, that should keep the both of them out of my hair for a while.

He took another drag and closed his eyes, listening to the currents of the camp, guys making the noises they were supposed to. This moment, he thought, would be perfect with some coffee. He resolved to get up and make some.

Just as he came up with the perfect plan, the colonel pinged his halo. “Hey, Paul, we just got some new intel from FORSCOMJUN. Can you join Green and me over in HQ?”

Shit. His perfect plan was ruined. With a sigh, Paul stood up, checked his M-3a1 pistol on his hip, and started moving toward the HQ building. It wasn’t a far walk, for sure.

The HQ building was catty-corner to the barracks and was used by various Camp Kill-a-Guy agencies. The team’s portion of it was in a little secure room off to the side of the local TOC, or tactical operations center.

It was kind of a big phrase for a medium-sized room that held a halo communications amplifier, a large view screen, and a couple of desks. The room was Freak’s domain; he held down the commo section there and generally dwelt by the halo comms unit and view screen. Usually Freak didn’t make it out on many missions; the TOC was his home.

Paul navigated through the TOC to the secure room on the side. The colonel and Green were waiting for him inside; they were discussing something in
low tones. When Paul entered, the colonel looked up and asked him to close the door. Must be some secret squirrel shit they wanted to discuss, Paul thought. Probably some more mission prep stuff for the following week’s activities.