Stark held up his hand again, palm out toward Gomez but still commanding. "You don't insult a noncom in front of his troops. Period. "
¿Comprendo?"
The fire faded abruptly from Gomez. "Ah, hell." She sat, avoiding Stark's gaze. "Sorry, Sarge. I oughta know better."
"Yeah, you oughta. You're just lucky he backed down instead of making a case out of it."
"Hell, Sarge," Murphy offered, "he backed down because he recognized your name."
"I doubt that. I don't know him."
"He knows you, Sarge," Chen stated. "Everybody does. You've got a reputation."
"The hell I do," Stark noted sarcastically. "I'm just a Sergeant."
"You're the Sergeant who saved the line years ago after the enemy counter invasion," Billings corrected softly. "You're the Sergeant who stayed behind so the rest of his Platoon could escape. Everybody knows, even these idiots from Third Division. Those who weren't there saw it on vid."
"So what?" Stark demanded. "I did my job. That's all."
"You did more than your job," Murphy insisted. "Sarge, if we're in a bar and other soldiers find out we're in your Squad they want to buy us drinks and stuff just so we'll talk about you."
"You've gotta be kidding."
"No, Sarge." Murphy bent his head, trying to hide an uncharacteristic blush of embarrassment. "Heck, I'm really proud to tell other guys I'm in your Squad. You're sort of a hero."
"Oh, hell." Stark looked around, trying to project disgust. "You apes ought to know better than that. A hero is just a bum who happened to be in the right place at the right time."
"And did the right thing?" Gomez suggested.
"Okay, I guess I did the right thing. So what?"
"So if you hadn't," Chen pointed out, "we'd all be dead."
"Maybe. Maybe not. You guys said your thanks a while back. I appreciated that. But let it drop."
"Okay, Sarge," Billings agreed. "But everyone else is still gonna remember."
"I guess that'll be my cross to bear." Stark looked around, then focused back on his Squad members. "I probably shouldn't have told you guys to go to the Out-City tonight. There're too many new troops around."
"Yeah," Murphy agreed. "And they're looking for a fight, Sarge! Guess they never been in combat."
"They haven't." Stark felt his face harden. "They're going to be. They're going to get the worst fight of their lives if what I hear is true. So just stay clear of them. They've got a real bad shock coming up."
"Maybe we oughta just go back to the barracks," Billings offered. "It's pretty crowded, now, though," she added. "I'm sleeping on the floor."
"You can share my bunk," Chen suggested.
"In your dreams, Earthworm."
Stark leaned toward Gomez as the others bantered. "Anita, you know where Mendo is?"
"Yeah, Sarge. He headed into the Patton Bar on the way here. I guess he and the guy who owns the place like to debate philosophy or something."
"Thanks." Stark tilted his head to indicate the rest of the Squad. "You need help getting these guys back safe?"
"No,
Sargento.
We're already there."
Stark headed back out into the street, sparing a rare glance upward as he did so.
Never look up anymore. Why bother? Nothing but rock or an ugly metal ceiling inside, and nothing but stars, a sun you can't look at, and an Earth you can see but not get to outside. HUDs tell us if anything is going to fall on us. Funny how life up here changes things in ways you never even think about most of the time.
He turned left, heading back toward the outer edge of the Out-City.
A few minutes later, in the sort of wide underground corridor that marked the main drag in this part of the Out-City, Stark stood under the small, flickering red, white, and blue neon sign that marked the Patton Bar, its multiple colors casting dim illumination onto the poorly lit central area where people and an occasional electric cart passed in a spasmodic stream.
No sense in wasting light fixtures, and the power to light them, in a place where the civs hardly ever went,
Stark reflected. He leaned against the stamped metal sheet that made up the facade of the bar, watching the neon colors shift as he waited, until the soldier he'd been waiting for stepped out of the doorway a short distance away. "Mendoza."
The Private jerked in surprise at Stark's call, then came to stand near him under the garish neon light. "Yes, Sergeant?"
"There's been something I've wanted to know for a long time. Why the hell aren't you an officer?"
Mendoza hesitated, staring first at Stark, then into the dimmer areas beyond the light. "My father was an officer, Sergeant."
"The hell." Stark felt suddenly awkward, wondering what fate might have consigned an officer's son to enlisted ranks. "Look, I—"
"That is all right, Sergeant." Mendoza brushed aside Stark's half-formed apology. "My father left the active service as a Lieutenant. He could rise no higher, because he was a man of honor who refused to treat officer rank as a political prize. He advised me that unless I could forgo honor myself, I could have no future among the officer corps which rules our military in this day."
"That's tough advice."
"Yes, Sergeant, but true. The enlisted personnel"—Mendoza smiled sadly—"they are not angels, but they are at least true to each other. Why did you ask me your question now, Sergeant? I have been in your Squad for years now."
"Because we need good officers, Mendoza. The things I've been hearing lately have made that need a lot more obvious. Couldn't you change things, try to make the system better?" Even as Stark spoke, he knew the words were wrong, the sort of thing someone with no experience in getting run over and crushed by the real world would suggest.
Once again, though, Mendoza failed to take offense, instead shaking his head and speaking with earnest seriousness. "Sergeant, it is not so easy. There are always some bad officers, obsessed with their own careers to the exclusion of the tasks they swear to carry out. It has always been that way. But when an officer corps begins to go bad, when too many of the good officers leave in disgust and too many of the poor ones stay on to play political games, it is something that can happen fairly quickly and yet take a very long time to correct. Because now the self-obsessed careerists control the promotions and the job assignments, and thus they can eliminate anyone who does not play the game their way."
Stark nodded somberly. "So anybody who tells the General his idea is screwy gets canned, while the ass-kissers who tell him he's a genius get promoted."
"This is so," Mendoza agreed sadly. "The corruption worsened during the long draw-down after the twentieth century's Cold War, when so many officers were discharged in just a few decades, and of course it was the political ones who survived because they cared more for their own survival than for the people they commanded and the missions those people were ordered to carry out."
"So you're saying there's nothing we can do? The mil is just stuck like this?"
Mendoza hesitated. "Usually, in history, such a corrupted military would eventually fall in the course of a war, but the United States is too powerful, Sergeant. We hold an unmatched strategic arsenal, of which nuclear weapons are just a part. No one may threaten the United States itself, and so the military never really faces crucial, total defeat. I do not know how this can end. A losing war would purge enough of the bad officers to help rebuild a decent officer corps again, but how can such a thing ever happen? How, now, can enough officers be removed at once to allow good men and women to prevail?"
Stark frowned, eyes hooded under the glare of the bar sign. "Something about the way you said that sounded scary, Mendoza."
"I meant nothing frightening, Sergeant," Mendoza advised hastily. "I am afraid I think too much inside. Sometimes, when I speak, the inside thoughts come out too easily."
"Huh. You think good, usually, Mendo. You're wasted as a Private, but I can't tell you to become an officer, not after your own father told you different and not when I know you're right about the officers who run things these days, but I hope you're wrong about one other thing. This can't last. We can only hold the mil together for so long if the people in charge are worried about everything but their people and their jobs."
"Is something about to happen, Sergeant? All these new soldiers are arriving, and they seem very sure of themselves."
"Yeah, that they do." Stark exchanged brief glances with a group from Third Division as it passed with wobbling footsteps. "You know a lot about history, Mendo. How much do you know about corporations?"
Mendoza made a face. "Some, Sergeant."
"What motivates them? I mean, they want to make a lot of money, right? Is that all?"
"Not entirely. A lot of money is nice, but they also always want to make more. No matter how big the profit is, they want it to be bigger."
"Always? They're never satisfied?"
"No, Sergeant, they are never satisfied. Every year they must grow larger, and have larger profits, or the corporation is seen as failing. It is strange. A corporation could gain total control of every market in the world, but then it would be a failure because it could no longer keep growing. I have never understood it, but then I was raised military." Mendoza looked puzzled. "Does this have something to do with the arrival of the new soldiers?"
"It might. The enemy holding us inside this perimeter are certainly keeping the corporations from growing here on the Moon. But I don't know for sure. Thanks, Mendo. The rest of the Squad's heading back to the barracks. You probably ought to do the same." Stark gripped Mendoza's shoulder in a brief gesture that brought a sudden smile to the Private's usually anxious face, then left, walking toward the barracks on his own.
Not sure what's happening. Not sure why it's happening. Life in the army. I bet Mendo would say it's always been that way.
His steps quickened, as if faster movement on his part would somehow make the next several days pass more quickly.
Mail call. A very old name for a very important thing. The form of the mail had changed over time, from rice paper with a few precious words scribbled in smeared ink, to archaic computer discs with a little magnetic memory precariously balanced in their guts, to the current almost indestructible coins that provided vid playback when popped into any convenient reader. The ancient cliché had it that strong men wept if they left mail call empty-handed. Not anymore, of course. Now you'd have to say strong men and women wept.
Except Stark. With his mil "family" around him at all times and a consistent dearth of long-term girlfriends he'd never expected mail, never been disappointed by empty hands when the last coin had been tossed to an eager receiver. But now he stood, not just one but two coins in hand, wondering what they could mean and who could have written.
At least he didn't have to hunt down privacy, like most of the rest of the soldiers in the barracks. Stark slid his cube door shut, then popped the first coin in. "Greetings, Ethan Stark." A woman. A civ. Looking bright and precise in good clothes and one of those nice gravity-defying lunar hairstyles that the civ women favored. He knew her, from a hospital visit whose purpose he never had figured out. "My name is Robin. Robin Masood. I need to talk to you on your next visit to New Plymouth. My number is enclosed. Please use it. I'd really like to see you again." The screen blanked as the brief message ran its course.
"The hell," Stark muttered, rubbing his chin warily. A civ, a good-looking civ with presumably her pick of civ men, wanting to see a mil noncom. Not that he minded the implied compliment, but this Robin Masood seemed out of his league. He could see her, maybe, on some officer's arm, but not his. She didn't look like a beer-and-then-another-beer kind of woman, and whatever virtues Stark believed he had, he knew he was that kind of man. "What's she want?" he wondered aloud.
Guess I can go into town tomorrow. Beats hanging around the barracks staring down Third Division Earthworms. But she won't be living in the Out-City. Not a high-class civ like her. Maybe I shouldn't . . . ah, hell, Stark, what are you afraid of? If some civ cops give me a hard time, I'll take them apart.
He keyed the attachment on Robin Masood's letter to call up her number, then downloaded it into his palmtop before reaching for the next coin.
The second coin slid in smoothly. Stark frowned in momentary puzzlement as a man appeared, some sort of distorted and older version of himself, like the fake aging mirrors played back in cheap funhouses. "Ethan?" the older, different version of himself faltered, and as it did, realization flooded in. He'd had it backward, for Stark was the younger version of the man on the screen.
"Dad." Ethan only had time for the single word before the old man began speaking again, face twisting as if words were unaccustomed to it.
"Ethan," his father repeated. "I, I got your mail. I, uh, I. . . ah, hell. Thanks. Maybe you were ten kinds of fool to get into the military, but I'm glad you're still alive. I didn't understand a lot of what you said, what all you do, but I guess you've got a lot of responsibility now. People depend on you. That's . . . well, that's really important. Me, I was never good enough for that. Just a fish farmer, like you always said. Only things that depended on me were the damn fish. And you and your mother, I guess. And I thought I'd let you down. For a long time. Only one kid, one chance, and I screwed it up."
Stark's father looked down, mouth working in remembered anguish. "But maybe not. Your friend, I guess she is, somebody named Reynolds, she sent us a copy of some award you got." Suddenly his father's eyes shone with something Stark had never seen there. No, two somethings. Not just tears, but also something more. "You were going to give your life for your friends. Almost did. After we got that letter from your friend Reynolds we called up a copy of the vid broadcast and watched. How did you do it? All those people trying to kill you, all those bullets, and you stayed because you believed you should."
His father glanced up, as if looking Stark in the eye, shaking his head in wonderment. "My son. Here I thought you'd never be half the man I'd been and instead you're twice what I ever was. Three times what I was. I don't care about that hero crap, but I sure care that you protected those people. You don't ever let them down, Ethan. I know I let you down, but you're more than me now, and I'm proud of that. Don't let them down, because they need you, and maybe you need them."