Terms of Enlistment 01.2: Measures of Absolution (7 page)

Her right arm is bandaged from fingertips to elbow. There’s a dull ache throbbing underneath the antiseptic gauze, but when she tries to flex her fingers, they obey. She uses her left hand to check the right side of her body. More bandages, taped to her skin, worse aching underneath. She feels like absolute shit, like she just woke up with the world’s worst hangover.

The room is small, just the overhead light, a toilet,  and the bed in it. Her bedroom back home in Atlanta was smaller still, but not by much. Jackson checks the bed and sees that it’s bolted to the concrete floor in typical welfare housing fashion. She throws aside the thin blanket covering her and sees that she’s in a set of military issue underwear that aren’t the ones she put on when she left for this fucked-up drop. Both her ankles are tied together with polyplast restraints, and there’s a strand of it connecting her shackles to the bed frame. At the far end of the room, there’s a steel door, but Jackson doesn’t even have to try to know that her tether is just long enough for her to use the toilet, but too short to let her reach that door.

She sits up, ignoring the pain that shoots up her side, and clears her throat. There’s nothing in the room she can use as a weapon, and without a good knife, she can’t get rid of the plastic shackles that keep her feet together.

She clears her throat again. Her mouth is so dry that it feels like she’s gargling with wood splinters.

“Hey,” she shouts toward the door. Then again, louder. “
Hey
!”

She doesn’t have to wait long. On the other side of the steel door, there’s shuffling, someone getting out of a chair maybe. Then the door opens, and a surly civvie in combat fatigues looks at her without expression. He doesn’t say anything, just studies her for a moment. Then he closes the door again.

Jackson sits and waits.

Two minutes later, the door opens again, and someone else walks in.

The man who steps into the room is tall and lean. His skin is almost as brown as Jackson’s. He wears his hair in a military cut, shorn close to the skull on the sides and left just a little longer on top. From his bearing, the economy of his movements, Jackson knows that this man is a combat trooper.

“Good evening, Corporal,” he says to her, and it’s the same voice she heard over the security feed in the residence tower before things went all to shit. It’s silky and sonorous, and it carries the air of authority.

The man carries a plastic cup. He walks up to the bed and hands it to her, along with a handful of pills. She takes them without taking her eyes off his face. He has a closely cropped beard and mustache, shaved so thin it’s barely more than a black circle around his mouth.

She takes a sip from the cup. It’s water—warm and with a slightly rusty smell to it, but liquid to get the tissues in her mouth and throat back into speaking shape. Jackson downs the contents of the cup briskly.

“Where’s my squad?” she asks him.

He regards her with a faint smile.

“No ‘where am I’, no ‘who are you’, or ‘how long have I been under.’ Just concern for your troopers. I appreciate a combat leader with her priorities in the right order.”

She doesn’t reply, just looks at him without expression. She has already sized him up to see if she can take him down, and concluded that she can’t. He has stepped back just enough out of reach that she won’t be able to launch a surprise attack, as if he doesn’t even want to tempt her into trying. Jackson can tell that this man is as tightly wound as a steel spring underneath his clean fatigues. He radiates a sort of latent, barely restrained energy that reminds her of Sergeant Fallon, who looks like she’s always half a second away from unleashing violence.

“Your squad fought well, but they got the short end of the stick in the exchange,” her visitor continues. “Five were killed in action. The other three should be back with their unit right now.”

“Bullshit,” Jackson says flatly.

“We took their guns and gear and let them go,” he says. His clinical, calm tone tells her that he doesn’t give a shit whether she believes him or not.

“Why would you do that?” she asks. “Let them go when you know they’ll be back with new guns soon.”

“Because we don’t kill people unless we have to, and because I have no interest in going into the prison business. Too many mouths to feed around here as it is.”

Five dead
, Jackson thinks.
Because I told them to fight, and they listened.

“What about the rest of the platoon?”

“A mixed bag,” her visitor says. “Most were let go. A few of them accepted our invitation to stay. Nobody was harmed. We had a full company in the atrium, and crew-served weapons. Your platoon commander had the good sense to recognize an unwinnable scenario, unlike you.”

He clasps his hands in front of his chest and pauses briefly.

“I do admire your initiative and your fighting skills. After you turned down my offer, you managed to keep an entire platoon busy trying to flush you out. And your squad killed seven of my troops and wounded eight more. But you pissed away the lives of your troopers for nothing at all.”

“Not for nothing,” she says. “Can’t just surrender to everyone who asks. Sets a bad example.”

He looks at her with that intense gaze, his face perfectly expressionless.

“I suppose it would,” he says.

He takes the chair out of the corner of the room and puts it next to the bed. Then he sits down, just out of her reach, and folds his hands.

“Where did you serve?” she asks him point-blank. He doesn’t even raise an eyebrow, just smiles faintly.

“Marines,” he says. “2080 to 2106.”

If he served four terms, he must be in his early fifties at least. He doesn’t look that old, even if his short hair has a lot of silver in it. He looks at least ten years younger than that, which is unusual for a career space ape. That lifestyle wears a body out fast. Could be he’s bullshitting her, but somehow Jackson knows he doesn’t feel the need to lie to her.

“Officer?” she asks, and he nods.

“I was a Lieutenant Colonel when I left. Never did get to pin on those eagles.”

He leans forward and studies her face, his chin perched on his steepled fingers. Then he gestures to the area under his eyes.

“Your facial tattoos. What do they mean? I don’t recognize that pattern at all.”

Jackson shrugs.

“Saw it in a manga when I was a kid. Thought it looked bad-ass. Thought I needed to look bad-ass back then.”

He nods at her explanation.

“You’re going to let me go, or kill me?” Jackson asks.

“I’m not going to kill you. I will tell you that the sergeant whose squad you mauled was ready to finish you off on the spot in that staircase. We don’t run things like that around here. But I can’t let you go just yet either.”

“He the one in charge of the people that shot it out with us?”

“Yes, he was.”

“Then you should have let him. I get the chance, I’ll finish
him
off.”

Her visitor shakes his head, slowly, like he just heard some kid say something outrageously dumb. Then he gets up from his chair and carries it over to the door, out of her reach.

“You were out for a while. You’ll be hungry soon. I’ll have someone bring you some food. It’s not military chow, but I suspect you’re no stranger to welfare rations. I’ll be back later, when you’re fed.”

He walks out and closes the door from the outside. The snap of the deadbolts seems loud in her nearly empty room.

A little while later, someone else brings in a meal tray and puts it on the ground without saying a word. Jackson watches him unblinkingly until he is out of the room again. She gets out of bed—slowly and carefully—and retrieves the tray. It’s the standard generic soy-and-shit chicken they put into the welfare meals with various flavorings. After she enlisted, Jackson told herself she’d never eat another welfare meal, but she has been famished since she woke up, so she eats everything on the tray and washes it down with the box of bug juice that came with the meal. If she wants to get out of here in one piece, she needs to give her body something to burn.

She makes the bed, pulls the ratty sheet over the mattress and tucks it in tightly, then straightens out the wrinkles. Then she lies down on the bed and closes her eyes for a nap. Fed and rested can fight longer and run faster than hungry and tired.

When the door opens again, she is awake instantly. She swings her legs over the side of the bed and sits on the edge, hands clasped in front of her. At least they didn’t shackle her wrists.

The tall, lean, handsome visitor from before walks into the room. He’s wearing the same sanitized fatigues—no rank insignia, no name tag, no unit patches. He eyes the empty meal tray on the floor. Then he picks up the chair from the corner of the room again and puts it in the precise spot he had placed it earlier, as close to the bed as possible while still being out of the reach of the shackled Jackson.

“Where am I?” she asks him. “Who are you? How long have I been under?”

He flashes the sparest of smiles. Then he sits down on the chair and straightens out the tunic of his fatigues.

“You are in PRC Detroit-22, in one of the residence towers we control. My name is Lazarus, and I am in charge of the force that captured and disarmed your platoon. You have been under for three days.”

“
Lazarus
,” she says, and almost chuckles. “Come back from the dead, did you?”

“In a manner of speaking,” Lazarus says. “It’s a bit of a long story, and I’m not sure you’d be interested even if I were in the mood to tell you.”

“They’ll tear this place apart when they come looking for us,” Jackson says. Lazarus shakes his head slowly.

“I have no doubt they’ll be back soon with more people, but we’ve long left the block where we ambushed your unit. We never use the same trick twice from the same spot. They’ll need to drop a whole battalion just to get control of one block, never mind twelve.”

“You control the entire PRC,” Jackson says, incredulity creeping into her voice.

“Most of it,” Lazarus says. “The wonders of centralized control and command. Now let me ask
you
a question.”

He reaches into one of the chest pockets of his tunic and pulls out a set of dog tags on a chain. Then he dangles them from his fingers for her to see.

“You had these on you when we stripped you of your gear. Would you mind telling me how you got them?”

The dog tags are those of Anna McKenney, of course. She had been carrying them in the water-tight pocket insert where she keeps all her personal stuff. She looks at Lazarus, who is returning her gaze impassively.

“I took them off a woman’s neck on the street in one of your shithole PRCs in the center of this shithole of a city.”

“Did you kill her?”

Jackson senses that a lot is riding on her answer. She doesn’t even consider lying.

“She wounded one of my troopers. Was about to finish him off. I put two bursts into her. Fuckin’
right
I killed her.”

He doesn’t say anything to that, just looks at her with this steely, unmoved expression, but she can tell there’s a lot swirling behind those eyes right now. Then he lets out a small sigh and looks down at his hands.

“I suspected as much. We never found her body, but we had a lot of missing that night. What a waste.”

Jackson agrees, although for different reasons. She doesn’t say anything else, though. Lazarus shakes his head and puts the dog tags back into his pocket.

“It’s
all
a waste, you know. Us down here, squabbling about who gets to eat how much of what shitty calories, you up there putting the boot on our throats whenever the pot boils over.”

“We keep order,” Jackson says. “We hold the line.”

Lazarus shakes his head with a sad smile.

“Is that what you think you’re doing? Do you see anyone
glad
for your presence whenever you come down into a PRC? Do you honestly not know how these people see you when you come in with your gunships and your battle armor, and walk the streets like you own the place?”

“Food’s shitty,” Jackson says. “Life sucks. I know. I was welfare before I joined up. But without the TA keeping you all from burning the place down, there wouldn’t be any calories for anyone.”

“You ought to know better than that, Corporal Kameelah Jackson,” Lazarus says. “You’re not there for
our
benefit. You’re there to keep the shit from spilling over into the suburbs and the upper-class gated communities. You’re attack dogs, and you don’t even know who is holding your leashes. When people see you tromping down the street in the PRC, they don’t see
law and order
. They don’t see
civilization
. They see an occupying army.”

Lazarus gets up, puts the chair back into the corner of the room, and looks at the door in front of him, fists clenched. Then he turns around, and for the first time Jackson can see emotion through his disciplined, collected expression.

“Just so you know, Anna McKenney was one of my platoon leaders. She was the kindest person I’ve ever known. Hell of a fighter, too. She was Navy, you know. Never had a lick of infantry training. We were together. If I had something like a soulmate in this life, she was it.”

Jackson feels her face flush, and she’s glad her skin color doesn’t make it obvious to Lazarus.

“I’m telling you this so you can appreciate how hard it is for me to not just go outside, fetch a rifle, and shoot you right in the forehead.”

He turns around and leaves the room. The door falls into its lock in his wake. Jackson doesn’t even realize she has been holding her breath for the last few moments until she exhales shakily.

Chapter Eight

Choices

The noise of the door opening shakes Jackson out of her sleep. Two of the uniformed civvies walk in. One stands by the door with a rifle, the other tosses a set of fatigues and a pair of slip-on shoes onto the bed.

“Get dressed,” he says. Then he steps up to the foot of the bed and snips her plastic restraints with a tool. “You try any funny shit, Olsen’s gonna go full auto on your ass.”