Polaris (3 page)

But as time went on, Moody began to actually envy those kids. The war consumed all the media, and it was clear, as the Alliance coalesced in a last-ditch effort to defeat Typhon, that democracy itself was at stake. Many of her former students were in the fight, doing something about it. They would come back to school occasionally, with their uniforms and their ribbons, and sometimes even with their wounds, and she could see it in their eyes: their lives had purpose in a way that hers did not. Meanwhile she continued to count textbooks and teach supply and demand, the Laffer curve, and price elasticity.

Finally, one day, a Navy recruiter lingered in her room after giving the standard pitch to her kids, and they struck up a conversation about officer programs. She fit the criteria, he enthusiastically told her: she was young, single, a college graduate. She found herself surprised as she listened, surprised at how right it all felt. She gave herself one more day to think about it, and then she drove down to the recruiting office, sandwiched between the Department of Motor Vehicles and a Laundromat, and volunteered to be a US Naval Officer. Over the next few days, she filled out a stack of forms with her personal information, took a short medical exam and a basic math test. The fantasy grew in her mind with each step: military glory, exotic ports of call, her own return to Oak Lawn in uniform, an example to all.

One week later, the Navy rejected her.

The embarrassed recruiter was flabbergasted. He tried his best to assuage her, afraid it would turn her against the entire recruiting program, of which she had become Oak Lawn High School's biggest supporter. He attributed it to an unusually good month for officer program recruiting, her lack of a technical degree, some kind of glitch in her application. He asked her repeatedly if perhaps she had something dark in her past that would have come to light in the initial background check, perhaps a youthful DUI or a shoplifting arrest. He finally left her alone in her classroom when it became clear that she now regarded his shoulder boards and ribbons as an insult, a reminder of her rejection.

For two weeks she simmered about it. The school year ended, and she resigned herself to a life in her small classroom, perhaps inspiring her students toward adventure, or maybe even glory, but never tasting it herself. Perhaps after the war and retirement, she thought, she could take a budget trip to Europe and see Rome or Paris.

Then one day as she sat at her desk in an empty classroom, compiling another semester of grades, a stranger walked into her room.

“Ms. Moody?” he said with a smile. “I'm Chad Walker. I'm a recruiter with the Alliance.” He handed her a business card that had no rank or title, just a name, phone number, and email address. And he wore no uniform, just a tasteful dark suit. She invited him to sit down. He somehow managed to look perfectly comfortable in the undersized desk–chair combo right in front of her.

The Alliance needed officers, too, he told her. Men and women who would work alongside the traditional military. People like her were desperately needed. “And I believe,” he said, looking her right in the eye, “that you would thrive as a military officer.”

“Would I have a military rank?” she asked. “A normal uniform? Could I do any job in the military?”

Walker answered yes to all her questions. You'll have all the same opportunities as a traditional military officer, he assured her. The war effort, and recent legislation, guarantees it.

“So what's the difference between being an officer in the Alliance and being an officer in the regular Navy?”

Barely any difference at all, he said with a chuckle. If you ascend high enough, you would eventually end up working at Alliance headquarters, rather than at the Pentagon. But in the trenches, you'll be a military officer, with the same privileges and responsibilities.

She said yes before he left her classroom.

There was a background check again, and another skills test. While the Navy had asked her math questions, the Alliance asked her political questions, and she wasn't always sure what answer they wanted to hear. Did she always vote? Had she ever run for office? Could she name the five original member countries of the Alliance? Could she name its current commander? Did she believe that every nation could function as a democracy? She sweated over the answers, desperate not to feel the sting of rejection again.

Two weeks after her physical, she got a congratulatory letter and her orders. She would begin basic orientation at the Alliance Training Center in the countryside west of Baltimore in one month. The orders contained a list of items she was to bring with her to training, and what not to bring: “minimal” cosmetics were allowed. Playing cards were not. The congratulatory letter was from the Alliance Commander, whose name, she saw, she had gotten incorrect on the entrance exam. She resigned from the Oak Lawn school district the next day.

Chad Walker was right about one thing: Moody did thrive as a military officer. She found an athleticism she never knew she had during training, excelling on the obstacle course, the daily runs, and the hand-to-hand combat sessions. She learned to her surprise that she was still a very good swimmer, her best sport in high school, cutting through the water so efficiently that she lost herself in the process, swimming laps until she lost count and had to pull herself exhausted up the ladder. The order and rigor of military life came easily to her; she was one of those people the military has always coveted, a person who found great comfort in being part of a system.

“Systems” was a keyword in her Alliance training, a shorthand for the simplified block diagrams they used to explain everything. The entire submarine was reduced to three blocks labeled
CONTROL, WEAPONS,
and
PROPULSION
. Turn a page and propulsion was reduced to blocks of
PRIMARY
and
SECONDARY
. One more page and the primary system was turned into blocks of
NUCLEAR REACTOR, MAIN COOLANT PUMPS,
and
STEAM GENERATORS
. Occasionally they would drag in an actual engineer who would show them photographs of pumps, breakers, and pipes, but it all looked drab and undramatic, indistinguishable blobs covered in wires and lime-green insulation, objects whose appearance seemed unworthy of their exalted positions and titles on the block diagrams. The reactor itself, the holy grail of the ship, the block that touched in some way every other block of every other diagram, looked like a large steel trash can penetrated by a dozen ordinary-looking pipes. After studying its characteristics and the nearly magical process of nuclear fission, seeing what a real reactor looked like filled Moody with the exact same flavor of disappointment she'd felt when she lost her virginity.

All the block diagrams were compiled in a softcover book that they were encouraged to take notes on, and it was universally referred to, by teachers and students, as “the engineering coloring book.”

The philosophy of the Alliance was treated similarly, in a separate coloring book: broad outlines in a neat, digestible framework. The pre-Alliance world was shown as a jumble of democratic nations, represented by small- and medium-sized blocks—the United States, Britain, Canada—all jumbled on a page, their energies directed in different directions, friendly but tragically unorganized. Opposing them, on the opposite page, was a large, unified block that contained inside it the allied nations of Typhon. Ominously, they were lined up neatly inside the Typhon block, and the lines of their individual borders were dissolving, as if Typhon were feeding on them to gain strength against the peaceful, unorganized nations it preyed upon.

On the next page, though, the Alliance was born: a giant dotted line that surrounded the friendly countries, which had suddenly lined up neatly to face their enemies in the Typhon block. Moody gathered that because the Alliance nations kept their solid borders intact despite their overarching block, they were still free and independent, just better organized to fight their enemy. Twice during their political course, they got word from their instructors that allegiances had shifted. An Alliance nation shifted to Typhon, and a Typhon nation shifted to the Alliance, and they were instructed to scratch out and hand-draw them in their updated positions on the appropriate pages of the coloring book.

She excelled at every stage of training, graduating number one in her class, and was given her choice of orders. She chose
Polaris,
the most advanced submarine in the fleet.

Once onboard, she soon found out that Chad, her recruiter, wasn't right about everything. She was not indistinguishable from other military officers. In fact, since their uniforms were all the same, it was generally the first thing officers asked each other at the officers' club, or the Navy Exchange, or the base gym while making small talk. And it was clear that when you answered “Alliance,” this was somehow a second-class status. Over beers, some regular officers would even confide in her, often while trying to romance her, that while they weren't talking about
her,
of course, everybody knew that the Alliance officers were generally men and women who'd been rejected by the regular military. The Alliance recruiters got lists of every reject, which became their feeding ground. The highest compliment that anyone could pay an Alliance officer was that they
probably
could have made it as a regular. This was a compliment that, to Moody's disgust, the Alliance officers even paid to each other.

It all just made her work harder, volunteer for every tough position, and pounce on it with a giant chip on her shoulder. On the
Polaris,
she attacked her qualifications and was promoted twice in a year. After two more years of impeccable fitness reports, and setting a squadron record for the physical fitness test, she was promoted to second-in-command. She got another personalized letter from the Alliance Commander, and oak leaves for her uniform. They had a real dinner in the wardroom to mark the occasion, with a roast beef that Ramirez had found in the darkest recesses of the deep freeze, served with respectable gravy and a loaf of fresh bread that was downright good. After the meal, Captain McCallister pinned the oak leaves on her collar and told her that he was delighted to have her as his Executive Officer.

Just a week later, she stepped into the galley to get a cup of coffee before taking the watch. The coffeepot was full and fresh, and the wardroom door was closed, indicating that someone was having a conversation that they didn't want overheard. She filled her cup and stood silently for just a minute, her curiosity piqued.

“So that's the way it is?” She could hear Ramirez through the door.

“She's worked hard,” said McCallister. “As hard as any officer I've ever known. She deserves this. I would have made her my XO regardless.”

“I don't work hard, Captain?”

“I need you in engineering. She's not qualified to run that plant, and you know that.”

“So I'm too qualified to be XO?”

“Stop whining,” said the captain, not without affection in his voice. “You're a fine officer, you'll get your chance.”

“If I can't get promoted on this boat, I'll never get promoted. They'll never let me off. That's the curse of an engineer.”

There was a pause; then the captain spoke quietly. “Everything OK with Tracy?”

“Fine,” said Ramirez. “I get letters every mail call, filled with pictures. I send letters every mail call. We're great at this now, we've mastered it.”

“Are you worried?”

“Worried that we might just be good at this: being a couple that never actually sees each other.”

“There's a war on,” said the captain. “That's the world we live in. And we're all beholden to the needs of the Navy.”

“The needs of the Navy?” asked Ramirez. “Or the needs of the Alliance?”

“Tell yourself whatever you need to tell yourself to keep this submarine running and to fulfill our mission. I personally don't give a shit if you do it for the Alliance or if you do it for the Navy.”

“Did you have to promote her, Captain? Did somebody tell you to?”

There was a long pause as the captain considered his answer. “Yes,” he said. “It's been encouraged for some time now: they want Alliance officers in command positions. But the guidance was widely ignored. So they formalized it. Every boat gets a Number Two from the Alliance.”

“So Moody is a token.”

“Would you rather have Frank Holmes as your XO?”

They paused for a moment; Hana pictured them drinking their coffee, the easy camaraderie they would never share with her.

Ramirez finally spoke. “To think, they told me an engineering degree would be good for my career.”

“Yeah?” said the captain. “They told me I'd be fighting Russians.”

*   *   *

“Commander Moody?”

She was snapped awake by the appearance of Frank Holmes, that muscular, dogmatic, slightly dense incarnation of the Alliance officer stereotype.

“Sorry,” she said. “I think I fell asleep for a second.”

“About earlier…”

“Forget it,” she said with a wave of her hand.

“Do you want a relief, ma'am? Hit the rack for a few minutes?”

It was incredibly tempting, but her eyes drifted down to the screen in front of her, where they had inched closer to the degaussing range, and their shadow had stayed, maddeningly, the same distance away.

“No,” she said. “No time. Find Hamlin. I sent him to medical a few minutes ago to get fixed up. Tell him to slap a Band-Aid on his head and to meet me in the wardroom so we can talk about what's next.”

Frank snapped to attention with ridiculous precision. “Aye, aye, Captain.”

He spun on his heel and walked down the ladder to find Hamlin.

 

CHAPTER FOUR

Two miles away, on the Typhon submarine, Commander Jennifer Carlson listened to the recording from sonar. Her second-in-command, Lieutenant Banach, stood next to her. She pushed a button, and listened again.