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