Angles of Attack (Frontlines #3)(100)
“So what rank are you going to hold in the brigades?” I ask. “You have got to be their first Medal of Honor winner. I figure Lazarus offered you at least colonel’s eagles.”
“Fuck, no,” she says. “Do I look like a goddamn officer to you? I’m staying master sergeant.”
“Good.” I grin. “Because I really can’t picture you as anything else in my head.”
“What about you two? I thought for sure you’d be on a boat back up to the carrier already. Especially you, Lieutenant,” she says to Halley. “No offense.”
“None taken,” Halley says neutrally.
“We haven’t decided yet,” I say. “No real rush. If the world ends tomorrow, it won’t matter. And if it doesn’t end tomorrow, it won’t matter, either.”
“Then stop the chatter and eat your porridge,” Corporal-now-Major Jackson says. “Shit tastes awful when it’s cold.”
She winks at Halley and me and gets up from the table.
“Don’t be late for your first day of orientation, Master Sergeant,” she says to Sergeant Fallon. Then she walks off, crossing the dining facility with that peculiar bouncy little swagger she’s always had.
“Outranked by one of my former squad nuggets,” Sergeant Fallon grumbles around her coffee mug, but there’s the hint of a smile at the corner of her mouth. “Well, Major Unwerth always warned me that would happen to my insubordinate ass one of these days.”
The air up here is fresh and clean, or as fresh and clean as it ever gets in a PRC. The drop-ship landing pad on the rooftop of the residence tower looks like it hasn’t seen any landings in years. We sit on the edge of the pad and look east across the river. The sun is climbing up into a gray sky, the ever-present pollution denying us the blue skies we should be seeing with the sparse cloud cover overhead. But the city has a rough and brutal sort of beauty to it—rows and rows of fifth-gen residence blocks, hundreds of towers lining both sides of the river and dozens of square miles beyond. It may be a rough patch of earth on the ground between all those blocks, but up here, it’s almost serene. There’s a vitality to all these warrens of streets and alleys, teeming with people every hour of every day.
“I think it’s nuts,” Halley says. “But so are all the other picks on the table. You said it—the fleet tucked tail and ran. We’re on our own now. What’s one drop ship going to do up there?”
“I can’t believe you’re even considering staying with the brigade,” I say. “You of all people.”
“I don’t hate the idea altogether.” Halley shrugs. “It would be interesting to get a pilot school off the ground in this place. Can’t say I wouldn’t like the challenge. What about you? What are you going to do if we go back up there to rejoin what’s left of the fleet?”
“Report to Regulus or Midway.” I shrug. “Put on another bug suit. Do combat drops. Probably die horribly and senselessly on some unimportant rock out there.”
“You make it sound so appealing,” she says with a laugh.
“They’ll retrieve Indy’s stealth buoys and try to figure out where the fleet went with all the good shit. I wouldn’t mind being a part of the ass-kicking that’s going to follow when the joint task force shows up wherever they went and reclaims whatever they ferried out of the system.”
Thinking about Indianapolis and Colonel Campbell is like a small, sharp knife in my chest. I wonder how many of the crew went into the escape pods before Indy made that last desperate attack run, and I’d love to be able to find out. But with Indy gone, most of my friends are dead, and those who are left are almost all down here on Earth. Fighting the Lankies on Earth, as terrifying as it is, feels right. It feels like I’d be doing what should have been my job all along. But what’s left of the fleet will need every hand on deck if we want to keep the Lankies away from Earth in the future.
“I don’t want to decide this right now,” I say. “I don’t want to leave again and go wherever some pencil pusher with stars on his shoulder boards tells me to go. But I don’t want to just piss on my oath of service.”
“?‘I solemnly swear and affirm to loyally serve the North American Commonwealth, and to bravely defend its laws and the freedom of its citizens,’?” Halley recites. “Doesn’t say where and how. Just says to bravely defend. You can do that down here just the same. Maybe better. Fewer pencil pushers.”
I look at the pale and diffused sunlight glistening on the river. Down below, on the waterfront, the ever-resilient seagulls are circling in the breeze and diving for scraps, white specks in the distance.
“You got the letter,” I say. “The one you punched me for.”
“I did,” she says. “Came in the interstation mail.”
“I wonder if my mom got hers. I sent it with the same guy, on the same day.”
“They were still doing mail runs from and to Luna until the relay went on the fritz,” Halley says. “That was only two days before you got there. I’m pretty sure she got it.”
She puts her hand in mine—her right hand, my right hand, not the one that’s half-gone and wrapped in trauma gel. I wonder how many doctors Lazarus has recruited, I think.