Marko Kloos - Terms of Enlistment

“The brass at Division is throwing fits over Detroit, Sergeant. The civvies are up in arms. They’re still putting out the fires, you know. That rocket took out twelve million adjusted dollars of government property, and thirty-seven civilians. You’re out of your mind if you think the battalion can sweep that one under the carpet.”

“Make it happen,” Sergeant Fallon says. “I don’t care how you do it. You sock Grayson with so much as a weekend curfew, you might as well just eat your gun.”

“And how the hell am I supposed to do that?”

“Transfer me,” I say.

Major Unwerth and Sergeant Fallon both look at me in surprise.

“Do what now?” the major asks.

“Transfer me,” I repeat. “Send me to a different service. You get to tell the division brass you’ve kicked me out, and they have something to tell the civvie press.”

“Not a chance,” Major Unwerth says. “You can’t transfer out of TA.”

“Sure he can,” Sergeant Fallon says. “They do inter-service transfers all the time. Get on the comms with your friends in S1, and make it happen.”

“The only way we ever do those is through Occupational Needs transfers. All I could get him would be a shit job. They’d put him in a slot they can’t fill with volunteers.”

“I don’t care,” I say. “I’ll take whatever they have, as long as it gets me off the planet.”

“Do it,” Sergeant Fallon says to the major. “Do it, or I’ll make sure the rest of the battalion knows why I slugged you the first time, before they busted me down to Corporal.”

Major Unwerth just glares at Sergeant Fallon. I have no idea what she has on him, but it must be excellent blackmailing currency, because he bends over, snatches his hat off the floor, and then walks out of the room without another word or glance. He pulls the door shut behind him with emphasis.

“He’ll come back with a dozen MPs and have us both thrown in the brig,” I say.

“No, he won’t,” Sergeant Fallon replies. “Trust me on that one. He’ll call his buddies and shake loose a few favors. You’ll get your transfer, you’ll see.”

“You must have some shit on him,” I say.

“You have no idea.”

She doesn’t share any more details, but I can see that she’s completely unconcerned about just having assaulted and blackmailed the battalion’s S2 staff officer.

“Let’s just say I had a one-time Get Out Of Jail card, and I just used it on your behalf. Now finish your food and take a nap. Don’t worry about Major Unwerth anymore. The next time he comes to see you, he’ll mind his manners.”

The next morning, I find that my PDP has network access again. I’m in the middle of breakfast—scrambled eggs and toast, with a bowl of rice cereal on the side—when I hear the faint chirp that indicates waiting messages in my mail queue. I pull the PDP out of the night stand drawer and check the screen to see eighty-nine messages waiting for me. More than half of them are official company or platoon announcements, schedule changes, and general bulletins, but the rest of my mail queue is personal stuff, messages from platoon mates checking on my well-being. I scan the incoming queue until I find what I had hoped to see—a message from HALLEY D/SBCFS/LUNA/NAVY. The subject line is “Halfway there”.

I open the message with the impatience of a pill head unscrewing the cap on a bottle of black market pain killers.

>Everything OK? Haven’t heard from you in days. Did you pull guard duty on the ass end of your base, or something? Anyway, drop me a note. We’re officially halfway through Flight School. If you think Sergeant Riley was a hard-ass, you should meet my flight instructor. Tomorrow is my first hands-off flight on the right seat. I’d send pictures if they’d let me take some. Check in, will you? That’s an order, Private. (I outrank you now. HA!) —D.

I read her message a few times, just to make sure I can recall it from memory at will if my MilNet access gets turned off again for some reason.

I activate the keypad to write a response. I want to tell her about everything: Saturday’s domestic call, the squad shot up, Stratton and Paterson killed, my injuries, the court martial hanging over my head. But as my fingers hover over the keys, I find that I can’t write it all out after all. No matter how I arrange the words and sentences in my head, the text does not even begin to convey what’s on my mind. The MilNet isn’t the right vehicle for that kind of conversation, and once again, I don’t want to burden Halley with bad news.

I start typing out a reply, this one as vague and non-specific as possible, despite all the stuff swirling in my head that feels like it will blow off the top of my skull if I don’t let off some pressure and share my troubles with someone who’s on my side. I tell Halley that I’ve been laid up in sick bay for a few days, but that I’ll be back at battalion soon, that she’s a brown-nosing little instructor pet for getting herself promoted ahead of me, and that it won’t matter because I’ll be a twenty-star general before the Navy abandons all judgment and makes her a genuine officer. They will do just that, of course—on graduation from flight school, they’ll promote her to Ensign and send her to her first fleet assignment. I may not even be in the TA anymore when that happens, and I’ll never know about it, since I won’t have access to the MilNet anymore. If they kick me out of the military, Halley will never be able to contact me again, even if she wanted to stay in touch with a washout who has a dishonorable discharge around his neck for the rest of his life.

The thought of being back in the PRC, forever pondering the opportunity I lost, and being cut off from the only friends I’ve made since getting out of public school, hits me harder than anything else I’ve experienced in the last week. The thought of my impending death back on the streets of Detroit-7 wasn’t half as bothersome. Even the knowledge of Stratton’s death, the squad mate I liked best, doesn’t quite shake me like the thought of being back in the place I left, and being doomed to stay there forever after getting a taste of life elsewhere. Everything in the PRC is bland and gray and hopeless, but I didn’t even know just how bland that life was until I got to be alive for a while. Half the things we do in the military are tedious, boring, or dangerous, but at least you’re alive enough to feel boredom or fear. In the PRC, you have no contrast in emotions. You just wake up every day and feel as inert as the bed you woke up in, just a chunk of public property that’ll be broken down and recycled once it falls into disrepair.

I send the message into the MilNet, up to the satellite and then across the quarter million mile stretch of space between my hospital room and the Spaceborne Combat Flight School on Luna. Then I shut off the PDP, and stow it in the night stand drawer.

I feel like crying for the first time in many years, and there’s nobody in the room to witness it, so I give in to the urge and let the tears come freely.

In the afternoon, I go back down to the chow lounge, to see if Sergeant Fallon is around. I spot her in a corner by one of the projection windows, flexing her right knee and looking at her lower leg. When she sees me approaching, she smiles and raps her knuckles on her new shin, which has the dull gleam of anodized metal.

“Titanium alloy,” she says as I sit down in the chair across the table from her. “Feels weird, but it’s much stronger than the old leg. Maybe I should have the other one replaced, too.”

“That was fast. Didn’t they just fit you for that yesterday?”

“Day before yesterday. They bumped me to the top of the spare parts queue. I’ll have to suffer some dog-and-pony show with a few people from Army Times in return. They’re having me do a few weeks of rehab before I get to go back. As if I don’t know how to walk anymore all of a sudden.”