Terms of Enlistment (26 page)

On Friday, just before lunch, the door to my room opens again, and Major Unwerth walks in, immaculately dressed in his ironed Class A smock.

“At ease,” he says as he enters the room. I am fit enough to do push-ups once again, but I wouldn’t have snapped to attention for him anyway, but he just said the phrase on autopilot anyway, saving both of us a great deal of discomfort.

He walks up next to my bed, hat tucked underneath his arm. I look up at him and pointedly close my PDP. I was in the middle of composing a message to Halley, and I’m mildly irritated at the interruption, but Major Unwerth still has my fate in his hands, so there’s a great deal of anxiety mixed in with the irritation. I am, however, determined not to show this prick any more weakness, so I merely meet his disapproving gaze with what I hope is a neutral expression.

“Here’s the deal,” he says. “I got you an inter-service transfer to the Navy.”

I feel a sudden buoyancy in my stomach, and it’s pretty clear that I can’t quite keep the sudden relief out of my face, because Major Unwerth gives me a grim smile.

“However, there are some things you won’t like. For starters, your time-in-service counter will reset. That means you’ll start with the Navy as if you had just finished Basic. Your service time with the 365th won’t count towards your sixty-two-month obligation, or promotion eligibility.”

He’s correct—I don’t like that part at all—but he’s setting the terms, and I have a strong feeling that those aren’t up for negotiation if I want to get out of TA and into space.

“Also, you’ll be going into Neural Networks. That specialty is marked Urgent Occupational Need, so once you finish tech school, you’ll be locked into that job for the duration of your first enlistment period.”

I try to recall my knowledge of the TA Neural Network guys, and all I can remember is that it involves sitting on a chair in front of a NN admin console. It doesn’t sound at all like exciting or challenging work, but I already know that this is my only way into the Navy right now, so I just nod my head.

“Finally,” Major Unwerth says, “you leave as soon as you get medical clearance, straight from here. You’ll report to Great Lakes for your slot in the next Navy Indoc training cycle, just like a recruit fresh out of Basic. Five weeks of Indoc, and then it’s off to your tech school. No going back to Shughart once you sign the paperwork.”

That condition is much harder to swallow than the previous two. I don’t care about losing the few months of service time I had built up in the battalion, and I don’t mind learning how to sit in a chair and hold down a computer console for the rest of my service time, but being excised from my squad with such speed and finality feels like I got shot in the gut all over again. Apparently, I can’t quite conceal my sudden dismay, because Major Unwerth frowns at me.

“It’s a bit too late for you to change your mind now. I called in a lot of favors for this. Don’t think I’ll go back and undo all the paperwork now.”

“I’ll sign whatever I need to sign.”

Major Unwerth puts his hat and briefcase down on my bed, all the way by the foot end, and extracts a neat stack of forms from his briefcase.

“Now, I can stand here and let you read all the fine print, if you want, or you can just go ahead and sign, so we can both get on with our lives. There’s no hidden clause that will have you smashing ore in a refinery ship, I promise.”

From what I know about the Major so far, I wouldn’t trust his promise further than I can pull a Hornet-class drop ship with my teeth, but I know that he’s afraid of Sergeant Fallon, and I also know that the Sarge would break Major Unwerth’s neck if he went back on his promise. I hold out my hand for the forms, and he hands them to me. I briefly skim the stack of paper--dense Legalese, just like our enlistment forms back at Orem--and turn to the last page. There’s a pen clipped to the document clasp that holds the forms together.

For the third time in my short military career, I sign a bunch of forms and change my status with the stroke of a pen.

“As of this moment, you’re no longer in the Territorial Army, Mister Grayson. Your status is Assigned Navy, as if you had just finished your Basic training. You’re still a member of the Armed Forces of the NAC, but you’re not in the Navy until you report to Great Lakes.”

I nod slowly as I hand the stack of forms back to the Major. He tucks them into his briefcase, and then looks at me expectantly.

“The PDP is TA property,” he says when I shrug in response. “You need to turn it in. They’ll issue you a new one in the Navy.”

I take my PDP, with the half-finished message to Halley still on it, and hand it to the Major with numb fingers. The PDP won’t reveal my personal files to anyone, and the data is stored on the MilNet directly. As soon as I open my new PDP, my half-written message will be on the screen, exactly at the point where I left off, but it still feels as if I’m handing over my diary to a bully. Major Unwerth takes the PDP and slides it into his briefcase without even glancing at it. Then he takes a folded set of forms out of a side pocket and tosses them onto the bed.

“These are your transfer orders, and that concludes our business. Farewell, Mister Grayson,” he says and turns to walk out.

“Wait a second,” I say. “I don’t have my personal gear from Shughart.”

“I’ll have them send your stuff,” he says without pausing. He opens the door and walks out without looking back. He doesn’t even take the time to close the door behind him, as if I’m no longer worthy of any expenditure of energy on his part. I watch as he briskly walks down the hallway to the elevators.

Deprived of my PDP, I have no entertainment left, no contact with my squad mates or Halley. I lie down on the thin pillow again and stare at the projection window that is selling me the illusion of a windy autumn lakeshore outside.

I got what I had wanted since I walked into the recruiting office--a slot in a space-going service. When the doctor releases me for active duty, I’ll take a military shuttle up to Great Lakes, where all the new Navy recruits get their initial training, and in six weeks, I’ll go to my tech school on Luna. I’ll finally go into space and see the planet from a few hundred thousand miles away. After my training, I’ll travel on an interstellar warship that will take me dozens of light years away from this place.

So why do I feel like I’ve just been kicked to the curb and abandoned?

My stuff arrives the next day. The battalion doesn’t even bother to send out a staff monkey to deliver my few civilian possessions. Instead, they arrive in a standard military goods mailer, a little plastic tub that’s barely bigger than a meal tray. Inside are the two sets of clothes I had with me when I went off to Basic, the clothes I only wore for my trip to Fort Shughart after that.

It feels weird to see my civilian stuff again. It’s my last tangible connection to my old life. One of the sets is the ensemble I wore when I went to see my father—a half-sleeved shirt, a pair of jeans made out of synthetic cotton, and a thin hooded jacket in inoffensive gray. This is flimsy stuff that costs just a few dollars to produce, rags for the peasantry. When I try out my old clothes, I suddenly feel inferior, unworthy, out of place. In a way, I’m back to being nobody: no longer a TA trooper, and not yet in the Navy.

I change back into my hospital clothes. As drab and simple as they are, they’re a uniform of sorts, and they change me back into somebody who has business being in this room at the military medical center. I no longer feel like a hood rat who has managed to sneak into a place where he doesn’t belong.

When I get down to the chow lounge for the now-customary afternoon coffee with Sergeant Fallon, the spot where my PDP used to sit in my waistband feels unnaturally empty. I didn’t fully appreciate just how much I relied on it until they took it away.

“Hey, Sarge,” I greet Sergeant Fallon as I sit down across the table from her. She’s wearing her dark hair open today, and it’s the first time I’ve seen her without her usual helmet-friendly hairstyle. She looks a lot more feminine this way, and the strands of hair framing her face greatly soften her chiseled features. She’s an attractive woman, and if she wore a set of glasses, she could pass for a librarian instead of a soldier, if she wore clothes loose enough to conceal her rock-hard warrior build.

“Hey there, Navy puke.”

I grin at her salutation.

“Not yet. I have to wait until the doc says that I’m back to normal, and then I have to report to Great Lakes straight from here for the next available training cycle.”

“Well, good for you,” she says. “So I guess I won’t see you again after tomorrow.”

“What’s tomorrow?”

“They’re sending me to a different facility for rehab. A few weeks of some Medical Corps therapist showing me how to walk. I’ll be totally out of shape by the time I get back to the battalion.”

I’d be willing to bet half my discharge bonus that Sergeant Fallon is doing push-ups and pull-ups in her room every day already. She’s not the type to sit on her butt, watch Network shows, and eat pastries for a few weeks. I already pity the poor therapist who almost certainly won’t be able to keep up with his new patient.

“The major took my PDP when I signed the transfer paperwork,” I say. “I can’t get in touch with anyone right now. If you make it back to the squad before the Navy gives me a fully enabled PDP…”

I don’t know whether I want her to tell my squad mates that I’m sorry, or that I miss them, or that I’m ashamed I have to leave them without even saying good-bye, so I don’t finish the sentence, but Sergeant Fallon merely nods.

Then she reaches across the table and holds out her hand.

“You’re not in my squad anymore. You’re not even TA anymore, technically speaking, so we can just go by first names now. I’m Briana.”

I take her hand and shake it.

“Andrew, but you knew that already.”

It’s a bit weird to think of her as
Briana
instead of
Sergeant Fallon
. A week ago, addressing her by that name would have been inappropriate chumminess and borderline insubordination. Now we’re just two people, no longer bound by the complex rules dictated by military tradition and protocol.

Still, a part of me will never stop thinking of her as my sergeant. She’s the toughest, most competent, and most even-handed soldier I’ve known, and she runs her squad as a strict meritocracy. If only a tenth of the military consisted of people like Sergeant Fallon, we would have kicked the SRA off of every inhabited celestial body between Earth and Zeta Reticuli fifty years ago already. As things stand, we’re weighed down by people like Major Unwerth, who coast through the system doing only the expected minimum. If a
military is the reflection of the society it serves, it’s amazing that the Commonwealth is still at the top of the food chain on Terra. Even with all the dead wood in our ranks, we have been able to hold the line against the SRA, and the dozens of regional powers in the Middle East and the Pacific Rim that are short on resources and long on grievances with their neighbors.

“I hope I’ll see you again,” I say. “Can I stay in touch through MilNet?”

“Of course,” she says. “And when you get to take your leave, and you end up coming back Earthside for a week or two to visit the folks, stop by at Shughart and drop in on the squad, okay?”

“You can count on it,” I reply, even though I know that if I come back to Terra on leave, I’ll make a very wide berth around the old homestead.

“Space,” she says, in a tone that suggests the idea is the dumbest one she’s heard in weeks. “You couldn’t pay me enough to be a Navy puke, that’s for sure.”

“You’ve never wanted to get off Earth?”

“Hell, no.” She picks up her plastic coffee mug and takes a sip.

“Months at a time, in a big-ass titanium cylinder without windows, getting fat on Navy chow, and the only combat grunts on board are freakin’ Jarheads? No, thank you. I’ll stay on this over-populated ball of shit and slug it out with the Chinese and the Indians, thank you very much. There are still some decent patches of ground left on Terra, you know.”

“Yeah, I do,” I say, remembering the pristine little middle-class town near NACRD Orem, with its manicured trees and lawns, and the clean, snow-capped mountains rising up in the distance. “I just don’t think I’ll ever get a shot at living on one, not on this planet.”

“So you’ll try for twenty years and a spot on a colony ship?”

I shrug in response.

“Colony life is hard, Andrew. You think people are only nasty and mean and violent in the PRCs? You take a thousand of our best and finest, put ‘em on a colony ship, fly ‘em out past the Thirty, and drop ‘em on a newly terraformed pebble by themselves, and you’ll see all the shit attitudes from Terra popping up in short order. You’ll have the slackers, the self-righteous, the social engineers, the power-grabbers, the religious fruitbats, and three months of peace before people gang up in tribes again and start messing with each other’s shit. You think people like Unwerth only make it in the military? I’ve seen dozens of guys just like him in the civilian world. Imagine some
jackass like him as your colony administrator, and the next arbitrating body is a few light years away. Some of those outer colonies only get a visit from the Navy once or twice a year, and then it’s some old frigate dropping off supplies and checking satellites before skipping the hell out of the system again as fast as they can unload their hold. You get your patch of land, but you’re truly on your own, at the ass end of the known galaxy.”