Angles of Attack (29 page)

I don’t want to be awake when we pass Earth again for our ride back to Fomalhaut. I don’t want to see my home planet and Luna through the optical feed, close enough to make out continents on Earth and man-made structures on the moon, because I don’t want to be tempted to just jump into one of the escape pods and shoot myself Earthward. Luckily, I am so fatigued that knocking myself out completely takes no effort at all.

Back in my berth, I take twice the instructed dosage of the pain meds that Corpsman Randall gave me. Then I lie down on my rack, close my eyes, and wait for the warm and fuzzy sensation of the narcotics to flood my brain.

When I wake up again, my body seems to have lost all desire for independent locomotion. With the privacy curtain drawn, I’m in a little box that feels comforting and predictable. It lets me pretend that there isn’t a larger world beyond that curtain, tedious days spent standing the watch on a ship hurtling through the hostile vacuum of space, always just one major hull breach away from oblivion, in a galaxy full of genocidal aliens and a human race that isn’t much better in the ethics department.

I check my chronometer to find that I’ve slept for thirteen hours. I should be rested, and the overwhelming fatigue is no longer weighing on my brain, but instead of refreshed I just feel drained.

I get up and put on a fresh set of CDU fatigues. The ones I am wearing right now are from the supply chain of the carrier
Regulus
, as is my armor set hanging in its spot in the wall locker nearby. I’ve attached a name tape and rank insignia, but no unit patches. I’m not sure where I belong at this point. The fleet? The New Svalbard militia? The rebellious HD battalions? The crew of
Indy
? It doesn’t feel proper to declare membership in one of those groups above any of the others, so I claim no affiliation at all on my uniform right now.

I don’t want to go back to CIC and stare at a holographic globe for hours on end that shows me to the tenth of a kilometer just how far I am away from Halley and Earth again, and how fast I’m going the other way. Instead, I fasten the locks on my boots and wash up one-handed in the bathroom nook of my berth. Then I step out of the hatch and turn left, toward the NCO mess.

I am intimately familiar with
Indy
’s limited menu selections. There are two kinds of sandwiches: the standard service bologna, which is only half soy and actually has some meat content, and peanut butter and jelly, which doesn’t. Even considering all the gross combinations and throwing in a slice of soy cheese, there are only seven or eight ways to recombine the selection. Then there are standard field-ration packages, reheated in the galley. Those come in six different entree options, all of which are just half a degree more edible than the standard Basic Nutritional Allowance rations I used to choke down in the PRC back home. We haven’t had anything other than the prepackaged-ration stuff for weeks now, and it’s amazing how much the lack of food variety can drag down the general morale of grunts and sailors. The pain meds suppress whatever appetite I may have had left, but I can feel my stomach rumbling, so I grab a meal tray despite my lack of gusto and put a bologna sandwich and a cup of coffee on it.

I’m halfway through the coffee and two bites into the mealy sandwich when Dmitry walks into the NCO mess. He sees me sitting by myself in a corner of the room and crosses the mess hall. There’s a bottle in his hand, and he puts it down on the table in front of me as he sits down.

“Present,” he says. “From distillery on
Kiev
.”

“What is it?” I ask. The stuff in the bottle looks clear and innocent, like tap water.

“Is distilled fermentation,” he says.

“Fermented what, exactly?”

“Is best not to ask,” Dmitry replies. He pops the plastic seal of the bottle open with his thumb and pours a bit of it into my coffee before I can yank the mug away.

“You try. Is not so bad.”

“Your assault carrier actually has a distillery.”

“Is Russian ship. You will not find Russian ship anywhere in SRA fleet without engineer who knows how to make proper drink in secret.”

“And here I thought all my preconceptions about Russians were wrong,” I say. “You get twenty pounds of personal gear to bring with you, and you take along alcohol?”

Dmitry shrugs. “Is useful sometimes, no? Better than box of medals or playthings.”

I bring the mug up to my nose and take a smell. The familiar, slightly sour scent of the standard fleet soybean coffee substitute now has a slightly acrid quality to it. I take a sip, expecting to gag on the spiked blend, but it actually has a tolerable flavor, and I enjoy the slight burn on my palate.

“Not bad,” I say, and take another sip. Dmitry smiles and pushes the bottle all the way to my side of the table.

“You take. Keep for useful purposes.”

“This is serious trade currency, Dmitry. You can probably trade that to the galley cooks for a week of field-ration picks.”

“I pay you for what I owe,” he says. Then he nods at my bandaged hand. “You trade hand of yours for enemy battlespace coordinator.”

I open my mouth to tell Dmitry that that isn’t quite the case, but he waves me off impatiently.

“Yes, yes. I have codes for transition point. Was not personal favor. You save yourself and ship so we can go back to Fomalhaut.” He pronounces the system’s name with a
-ch
sound in the middle. “But is no matter why. You still lose fingers, and I still put air in lungs. Maybe—if things do not go all shit again—I go home one day. Because you hold hand in front of gun and make shots go down and not here.” He taps at his forehead and chest.

“You got anyone at home? Family?”

He blinks, as if my question has thrown him off a little. Then he reaches into the pocket of his lizard-pattern fatigues and fishes out a little personal document pouch. The SRA version looks much like the ones we carry around, just a tiny waterproof sleeve big enough for a handful of ID chips and maybe a letter hard copy or two. Dmitry reaches into his pouch and takes out a print image. He puts it in front of me almost gingerly.

“Maksim,” he says. “Husband. Big, dumb, but good heart.”

The image shows a soldier about my age. He has an aggressive buzz cut, and he’s dressed in the same lizard-pattern SRA battle dress tunic Dmitry is wearing. The undershirt is striped horizontally in alternating white and blue, and the beret under his shoulder board is sky blue.

“He’s a marine, too?” I ask.

“Like I say. Big and dumb.”

I grin and hand his picture back to him. Dmitry takes it and slips it back into his document pouch carefully.

That kind of personal disclosure requires a tit for tat. I take my own personal pouch out of my leg pocket and open it. It has my military ID in it, the last letter I got from Mom, and two pictures of Halley. I take out the one of her in her flight suit, the one I’ve been carrying around since she sent it to me back before I even joined what was still the navy back then.

Looking at her smile and that rugged short haircut of hers gives me a momentary ache that’s far worse than what I’m feeling from my healing nose or the bandaged hand. I give the picture to Dmitry, who raises an eyebrow and nods in appreciation.

“She is pilot,” he says. “Good pilot?”

“Good pilot,” I confirm. “Instructor at Combat Flight School.”

“What is she pilot of? Big piece of
govno
with big gun for shooting Russian marines? What do you call, Shrike?”

“Not a Shrike. Wasp and Dragonfly drop ships. Small piece of
govno
with smaller guns for shooting Russian marines.”

Dmitry chuckles, his eyes still on the picture of Halley. “Show me other one.”

I hand over the second picture, which is one of Halley and me at a fleet rec facility two years ago. We’re both wearing dress blues, and Halley’s fruit salad of medal ribbons is slightly but noticeably bigger than mine.

“Girlfriend? Wife?”

“Fiancée,” I say.

“What is fiancée?”

“We’re getting married,” I reply. “Once I get back. If we get back.”

Dmitry reaches into a different pocket and produces a small metal object, which he holds up and turns slowly with his fingertips. It’s a stylized eagle holding a wreath in its talons. The wreath has the Roman numeral
III
in its center. The eagle’s wings are stretched out behind it, a raptor in the middle of a high-speed dive for its prey.

“Another present,” he says. “I have these for fifteen years. Now I give to you.”

He hands the eagle badge to me. I put it on my palm and look at it.

“Are these jump wings?”

“I get at spaceborne training course. Is for dress uniform, to look pretty. Not for battle dress. You keep, maybe give to fiancée. You can tell her you took off body of dead Russian.”

“I can’t take your damn jump wings, Dmitry.” I put the eagle badge on the table and carefully slide it over to him. If the Sino-Russian marines put half as much value on their original set of jump wings from their version of a School of Spaceborne Infantry as our own SI troopers do, he just gave me the most sentimental thing he owns aside from the picture of Maksim.

“You take, or I punch color from your hair again, Andrew,” he says without smiling, and his expression makes it pretty clear that he won’t brook an argument. “Is poor trade for left hand, I know. But you take anyway.”

He pushes the eagle back across the table. It certainly looks like it has been worn for fifteen years. The gold enamel on the wreath in the eagle’s talons is rubbed off in spots, and all the high points of the relief stamping are worn smooth. I wonder if that little set of jump wings has been on a contested planet with its owner while I traded shots with him at some point.

“Fine,” I say. “Now shut up about the whole thing. Like you said, I was just making sure our ticket back didn’t get yanked.”

I open Dmitry’s bottle again and put another splash into my coffee. Then I hand the bottle to Dmitry, who accepts it without hesitation before taking a long swig. Then he caps the bottle and puts it back on the table.

“We are same, you and I. Both
duraky
. Fools. Idiots. They tell us, ‘Go here, shoot this man, call missile on this building,’ and we do. Shoot at each other for many years, kill each other’s comrades, and get little pieces of metal with colorful ribbon. We should not be here. We should be home, you and I. Back home with Maksim and . . . what is name of your fiancée?” He pronounces the new word deliberately.

“Halley,” I say. “Her first name is Diana, but she hates it, so she’s just Halley to everyone.”

“Halley,” Dmitry repeats. With his Russian accent, it sounds like “Challey.”

It almost seems like a cliché from an old war movie
, I think. Enemies get together, have a drink, exchange trinkets, and show off pictures of each other’s sweethearts, and then they realize that they have so much in common that they don’t want to fight each other anymore. The futility of war, young men and women ordered from above to kill each other for stupid reasons, and all that. But I don’t feel ennobled or enlightened by any of this. Mostly, I just feel like I’ve wasted most of the last five years of my life killing people who didn’t need or want to be killed, as part of a big stupid machine that has been chewing up the very assets we needed to fight the Lankies, the real threat. A little numbered cog in the meat grinder, ready to turn on command. And now the same people who pulled the handle on that grinder over and over are probably getting ready to walk away from the mess, hands clean, to leave the rest of us to our fates.

“
Duraky
,” I say.

Dmitry smiles sadly and gets up from his chair. “I will go sleep now, or maybe learn more secrets of fancy imperialist spy ship. Enjoy distilled fermentation,” he says.

I watch as he walks out of the NCO mess, which is now once again empty except for me and the bottle of Russian contraband ethanol on the table.

I eat the rest of my sandwich without much enthusiasm. My hand has started hurting again, so I pull out the bottle of pain meds and open the cap. Then I pop two of the little white pills into my mouth and wash them down with a swig of my spiked coffee. If I am going to check out of reality for a while, might as well do the job all the way.

The mess hatch opens, and two of the SI troopers walk in, Corporal DeLuca and Sergeant Acosta. I quickly take Dmitry’s bottle and stick it into the leg pocket of my jeans. Every second we move along on Red Route One toward the transition point means another few thousand kilometers of vacuum between me and Halley again. I know I made the right decision, but right now every passing hour increases my resentment of myself, and I need to take the edge off a bit. I nod at the newcomers and vacate the table to head back to my berth for some more warm and fuzzy narcotics-assisted alone time.

CHAPTER 17