Part 6 (1/2)

”Three questions, sir. Is there any age limit? What do you do for dependents? And can you perform marriages for anyone in your command?”

”No age limit, but I do interview, and if I think you're not mature enough to understand what you're getting into or to behave yourself and follow orders, I won't sign you. I have no brig, so the only penalties I have available are the whipping post and hanging; UCEMC limits me to thirty lashes within a month, which, believe me, is plenty more than I want to give, though I will if I have to. I don't want to have to whip or hang a kida-or, anybody else if I can help ita-so I don't enlist anybody if I think that issue might come up.

”For dependents, I send whatever part of your pay you request to them, but if you want them to move around and follow BTJ, that's all at your expense. I do pay a bonus if you're killed while following an order or during enemy attack, but that's usually not how your dependents want to get money from you, and it's my opinion that the bonus I offer just isn't worth dying for.” From the slight twitch of his mouth, I realized that that was probably a joke.

He continued. ”And if you were planning to enlist and get married, well, son, I'll be happy to perform a ceremony for anybody, in my unit or not. It's legally binding if I'm outside any superseding jurisdiction, which is a fancy way of saying that if you and your girlfriend want to get married, we can just go outside the Dome and I'll do it for youa-you don't have to enlist. Though I'd rather you did.”

Mr. Farrell said, ”You do know that these two are fourteen?”

Burton shrugged. ”I've married a thirteen-year-old boy to a twelve-year-old girl, because he wanted to enlist and he looked like soldier material to me. So far he's made corporal and their marriage looks happy. Life is short, these days, sir, especially for the young. A couple in love doesn't have much time to wait. Not to dwell on morbid things, but chances are that a soldier and his bride won't both live to regret being married, but one of them may well live to regret not having married. That's how I see it, anyway. And if they're fourteen, I believe you have to throw them out of the orphanage soon, anyway, since Spokane Dome won't let them stay here past their fifteenth birthdays.”

Farrell shrugged. ”I won't try to stop them; I tend to agree with you, for what that's worth, much as I regret it. Just wanted to make sure everyone knew the whole story.” He turned to us and said, ”Knowing Currie, he probably didn't bother to propose formally, did he?”

”This is the first I've heard of it,” Tammy said.

”Well, I think you've heard everything you need to know about Mr. Burton's organization. So would you two like to go up to one of the bunk rooms and talk about it a bit? I think Mr. Burton will be here for at least an hour longera-”

”And you can call mea-I have a secure com for thata-if you need to,” Burton added. ”So you have up to three days. But it would be great if you can decide more quickly.”

”We'll go up and talk,” I said, and Tammy and I, still holding hands, left the room. As I went, I could hear another kid asking, ”Is there any officer program?” and Burton explaining that he wanted every officer to have spent at least a year as a noncom. That was rea.s.suring too.

When we got up to the dorm room, Tammy said, ”If I say yes, will you try not to be smug about it? And will you at least ask me why I'm saying yes?”

”Okay, I won't be smug, but I sure am happy,” I said, ”and I guess I probably should ask why you're saying yes.”

She sat down on the bed, her thick ma.s.s of orange-red hair surrounding her face and hiding her expression. She counted it off on her fingers, as if she had prepared the list of reasons in advancea-maybe she did. ”One, I have to go somewhere, Spokane Dome isn't taking any new Doleworkers, and I don't want to starve or beg, so living off what you send me doesn't sound so bad. Two, I do like you a lot and maybe that's a good enough reason all by itself. Three, as of what the medical AI told me after doing some tests this morning, I'm three weeks pregnant.” She looked up at me from under the untidy shrubbery of her hair and gave me a shy, tentative little grin; I guess she wasn't completely unhappy about it. She always liked babies and little kids.

My stomach rolled over. I knew that Tammy was more religious than I'd ever been, and she wasn't going to have an abortion; and anyway I didn't want to never know my own child. I couldn't decide whether I was happy or miserable, but I hugged and kissed her before spending any time thinking about that; either way I would want to be with her. ”Well, then I guess getting married would be the right thing, and since the only jobs on the whole wide earth right now are for soldiers, and I need a job, that pretty much answers all the questions, doesn't it?”

”It wouldn't be the best start a family ever got, but it won't be the worst, either,” Tammy agreed, and we had a deal.

Early the next morning Burton met us, and the whole rest of the orphanage, out in a field outside the Dome (inside, marrying age was sixteen), and we were married in about ten minutes. Mr. Farrell was my best man, and Tammy's buddy Linda was her maid of honor; the bouquet, freshly picked daisies from the field where we were performing the ceremony, went to pieces when Tammy threw it, so either no one caught it or four girls did, depending on how you counted.

After the ceremony, we had a picnic lunch, and at the end of that, Burton swore me in, advanced me a loan so that Tammy could rent an apartment in the Dome, and gave me a forty-eight-hour leave to find the place, move our few possessions over from the orphanage, buy some furniture and dishes, and ”Do whatever consummating you have time and energy for, son, keeping in mind that this two days might be your whole marriage. Don't waste a d.a.m.n minute on rest. You can sleep in the diskster on the way out to Silver Bow.”

Burton, as I was beginning to suspect and would confirm a thousand times in the next few years, was a very decent guy, probably too decent for what was coming. Burton and Mr. Farrell, between them, were pritnear as close as I ever got to having a father. Lots of men have done worse.

<> When I enlisted with Burton, it was still the War of Papal Succession; most of the sides were either supporters of some candidate for pope, or groups trying to avoid the war and forced to fight to keep armies off their territory. By the time Carrie, our daughter, was walking and talking, Burton's Thugs for Jesus had moved far to the west, to the opposite frontier, where we guarded Snoqualmie Pa.s.s, and we no longer worked for a person or an organization. Our whole region had s.h.i.+fted over to the meme called Real America, which had bought out Burton's contract.

Even then, though people weren't yet calling it the War of the Memes, pritnear half of the four hundred or so sides on Earth were memes. Real America wasn't especially greedy or aggressive, but it did insist that everyone in any government post within its reach had to run Real America, as did the more important businesspeople. This wasn't altogether a bad thing; Real America tended to give people a cheerful, sentimental optimism and at least a veneer of generous tolerance. It was so psychologically effective that doctors who didn't run Real America would suggest it for depressed or psychotic patients (abundant in wartime).

Burton, like most mercenaries, didn't trust the meme, since it was often necessary to change sides and the meme could get in the way, so he forbade all of us to acquire Real Americaa-and better still, Real America respected that.

Even in places where memes were not so tolerant, enrolled members of mercenary companies were immune from the requirement of being memed, because they'd fight to the death to prevent it. You'd have to be crazy to be a trained, experienced soldier and run a memea-memes, finally, existed only to propagate themselves into as many brains as possible, and in the current struggle for power, they useda-and used upa-every resource they could acquire. We all knew what kinds of things an experienced soldier would get used for.

Tammy was still in Spokane, in the apartment I'd found for her, with Carrie. When BTJ switched sides and I got rea.s.signed, since it was faster by the diskster from Snoqualmie than it had been from Silver Bow, this was a pure gain. So far, for us, the war was an employment opportunity and a way out of the orphanage and out of poverty. In the abstract I knew that for others it was differenta-we'd beaten back several a.s.saults at Homestake, I'd been on many patrols out of Snoqualmie, and we'd run into firefights where I'd lost a few friendsa-but still, so far everything had gone better for me than I could have imagined, and although I was now a combat veteran, I was also just eighteen.

By the time we moved into the Snoqualmie fortifications, the One True and Only Ecucatholic Church was more commonly known as One True Church, and its forces had been thrown most of the way back to Renoa-it was a thoroughly totalitarian meme that most people were afraid of, because it did such a thorough overwrite of the existing personality, and any remaining doubts anyone might have had about the way One True Church operated had been settled by the way the way the Bishop of Reno behaved after it got hold of him.

The biggest worry for Real America, and for BTJ, we thought, was that Seattle Dome and the Puget Sound area around it had been seized by the Neocommunist meme, which was extremely aggressive militarily. We had an uneasy truce with One True Church, south of us, a peace agreement with the various Native groups north of us, and a de facto alliance with the Unreconstructed Catholics who held much of the old American Midwest and Ontario on our eastern boundary. Real America's frontiers were as secure as anybody's (not very), and our population was more prosperous than most (which didn't take much doing).

Aside from the Neocommies, we also had to worry about our hanging flank to the southeast. The plains and desert country beyond the mountains had been a sort of unclaimed no-man's-land ever since Denver Dome was nuked in *54. There were enough people in that big central stretch of the Rocky Mountain Front so that any government that tried to move in got into all kinds of trouble with resistances and liberation movements and so on, but it was empty enough so that an army could move through, and we had to figure that sooner or later we would have to wheel around, run southeast as fast as we could, and defend the whole Bighorn country until the citizen army could be mobilized. Fear that something big might suddenly come up the Bighorn or the Missouri kept a lot of our forces tied up around Billings Dome, which was frustrating for everyone, but that was the way it went.

Over my three years so far in Burton's Thugs for Jesus, Tammy and I had settled into an existence that might not have been the ideal way for kids to grow up, but worked pretty well for us. During my weeks on the line or in the reserve camp, she stayed in the apartment in Spokane, took care of Carrie, and got whatever schooling she could, either on-line or live, against the day when there might be regular jobs again. Whenever I got a leave, I'd hop a diskster back to Spokanea-four hours from Homestake, at first, and later only two from Snoqualmiea-and zip home to get reacquainted with my daughter and to spend as much time as possible with Tammy. I suppose, except for our ages, there wasn't much about the life that a soldier in any long war of the past wouldn't have recognized.

At the time I didn't know, either, how fortunate we were that most of the rules of war were still being adhered to. As far as anyone could tell, no one had unleashed bioweapons, most domes were not bombed or sh.e.l.led, and geosync cableheads remained demilitarized neutral zones. n.o.body was fighting to the last ditch; it was understood that the moment you knew you couldn't win, you surrendered or retreated. War, so far, was purely a matter between the mercenary companies.

On the other hand, there were some drawbacks to being a mercenary, even in a very humane war. Attrition was taking its toll, and hyperaccurate modern smart weapons meant that a much smaller number of men was needed for the same firepower. Though Burton's Thugs for Jesus had begun the war at battalion strength, and our effective firepower had increased, in numbers we were no longer more than a reinforced company.

By that time I was a corporal, leading a fire team, and the only way I was ever making sergeant was if my best friend Rodney, the squad sergeant, got killed. (Two squad sergeants stood ahead of Rodney for platoon sergeant, so I stood very little chance of a domino promotion.) The chance of advancementa-or the lack of chancea-didn't bother me at all. I could keep doing what I was doing indefinitely, and if the job was unpleasant, dangerous, sometimes terrifying, occasionally nauseating, well, it was a war, when you came right down to it. And my leaves were practically heaven on Earth; Tammy and I never saw enough of each other to have much to fight about.

I turned twenty, Carrie turned five, and life turned to dead solid s.h.i.+t, all in April 2058. By then Real America had taken a hammering and was just trying to hold on. One True Church had become One True, and had successfully seized several of the older memes. Our old Unreconstructed Catholic allies were suddenly a branch of One Truea-so suddenly that we lost Madison in four hours of a savage attack out of nowhere. A week later we had to abandon the Twin Cities Domes after a bitter fight, and we were thrown back to Fargo-Morehead Dome, where we finally made a successful stand.

We held through a bitter winter of fightinga-I made platoon sergeant, having buried all my predecessors. We got things squared away, got the Natives north of us to come in as allies, and seemed to be making more of a real fight of it. After beating back two a.s.saults in the summer, we felt much more confident, and when we retook the Twin Cities Dome in September, it looked like the worst of it was over. BTJ held the Twin Cities Dome against another winter a.s.sault, and that spring Burton told us that if we wanted to, we could move dependents up into Fargo-Morehead, so that they'd be easier to visit on the weekend.

I figured we had the front stabilized, and I'd rather have Tammy and Carrie near. There were good reasons. I'd missed them, while there had been so few leaves; Spokane had been attacked a couple times by One True's. .h.i.t-and-run raids out of Salt Lake and Boise; in the married-soldier barracks at Fargo, they could live under armed guard. It seemed like a rational decision.

To this day I think I should have been able to see that it was completely stupid to bring them up to Fargo, considering what we were fighting. When we retook it, the inside of the downtown Minneapolis Dome had been piled high with corpsesa-noncombatants all. One True had had no way to evacuate that group of women, children, and old men. Rather than let them be captured, and turned by any other meme, it had made them all walk off the roofs of high buildings.

It was One True that had broken all the truces and mercenary rules of engagement, and One True that had begun to aggressively infiltrate computer systems and weapons-control systems, seizing control of mercenaries wherever it could in order to copy what they knew. Then it loaded those aggregate mercenary memories into the brains of any kids it had, and sent them out with their badly working minds and their imperfectly a.s.similated training, to fight and die in the first wave of every attack. A regular mercenary company might kill eight or nine of those poor teenage zombies for every death it took itselfa-but a regular mercenary outfit, by then, wasn't much bigger than a hundred men, and One True could send three or five thousand of those enslaved kids against it. Every advance by One True made the war, and the world, uglier and dirtier; it seemed to be the one meme that didn't care what the Earth ended up looking like, as long as it got to rule.

The world tried to resist. Maddened by the fear of having their minds erased and replaced, countless people, crazy, paranoid, perhaps as dangerous as One True itself, devised memes, large and small, to subvert or attack One True, and to promote violence and disorder within One True's territory. One True hit back with the same kinds of memes aimed at the world at large, not caring who it hit. There were legends about a meme, or a counter-meme, called a Freecyber, a sort of meme-inoculation that could liberate you from One True or any other meme's control, but then there were legends about free pa.s.ses to the s.p.a.ce colonies, and hidden cities in Antarctica, and secret bases on the sea floor, where you could take your family and live peacefully forever. I didn't credit Freecybers any more than I did any of the others.

It was hard for anyone who had been in for as long as I had even to imagine the changes that were happening. One True was fighting to ”win” in a sense that no one had seen since the Eurowar, now almost sixty years in the past. People with severe psychological trouble, particularly severe depression and stress disorders, were easier for a meme to self-install intoa-and so One True's troops were encouraged to traumatize the population wherever they went, and the all-but-forgotten custom of serbing captured women and children resumed in those last years of the war. As our electronic equipment became more and more vulnerable, we resorted to more and more primitive weapons and tactics, trying to avoid being hooked up to anything, even a phone, through which One True, or one of the rogue memes, or even the re-engineered (and much more aggressive) Real America might seize control of us. As memes increasingly were able to disguise their presence, and often to spread incrementally through conversation and ordinary daily interaction, we began to fight in pairs or trios, limiting our contact with anyone else. The almost civilized war I had joined was turning into the real Fourth World War, and it was rapidly catching up with the Eurowar and the two wars of the twentieth century for its savagery and lack of restrainta-and it would probably end like all of them, in the sheer collapsed exhaustion of the losing side.

It seems so obvious in hindsight. I should have known how the world was going. I should have resigned, or deserted if Burton wouldn't let me go, grabbed Tammy and Carrie, and run like h.e.l.l to somewhere; taken all my saved pay, maybe, or robbed some place, gotten enough money to pay our way onto a transfer s.h.i.+p, and emigrated to Mars. Sometimes I really did think about that, but at the same time I felt like I owed Burton a lot, and he was more and more shorthanded.

So I procrastinated and didn't resign, didn't desert, didn't look for a place where my family could move far away from the fighting, read the emigration information for Mars a hundred times and even realized I could probably make a living as an ecoprospector and might even like the work. I thought about it frequently, but I did nothing and just let it drift.

I had figured everything wrong. I found out just how wrong in the first week of August, 2059. I woke to the alarm in the middle of the night, rolled over, kissed Tammy, pulled on the fighting clothes, went into Carrie's room and gave her a quick hug, receiving a sleepy little kiss on the cheek, and pulled the gear out of my weapons locker. By then Tammy had come out in her bathrobe; she said, ”Any ideaa-?”

”It's what they call an urgentest,” I said, shouting to be heard over the alarm, which would keep ringing until I went out the front door. ”Usually means we've got to jump on a diskster, go someplace, and fight. Get on-line and make sure all my insurance is paid up, will you, honey?”

”Is One True invading again?”

”Could be. Or maybe some ally switched sides.” I checked; I had all the gear I was supposed to be picked up with. I desperately wanted another quick leak, a snack, anything for twenty more minutes with Tammy, but the alarm was whooping (I could hear most of the other alarms in the married-soldier barracks doing the same thing), and no matter how often I did this, I always wanted twenty minutes more. I could pee and eat on the diskster, going in; it was really just that I wanted time with Tammy. I contented myself with a long, awkward kiss, as she managed to fit against me despite all the hardware hanging from the suit. ”I'll see you soon. Love you,” I said, and left.

Two guys were already waiting at the pickup spot, and within five more minutes there were ten of us. My ”headquarters” squad was a good onea-I'd handpicked a bunch of experienced types to put plenty of vets around me, and everybody in the squad had at least two years fighting experience under his belt. The squad sergeant, Mark Prizzi, had been among the first squad of soldiers I'd ever trained, back when I was a corporal.

My headset popped. ”Dog Platoon, come in, Currie.” It was Burton.

”I'm here, sir,” I said. ”Headquarters squad is all a.s.sembled, waiting for pickup.”

”Check your other squads.”

I did; all were at stations. I reported back to Burton.

”Good so far,” he said. ”But it looks like the enemy has managed to virus our pool of disksters. Figure a half-hour delay till pickup, while we reload memories into all of them. You can let men go back inside if they want to do anything for fifteen minutes.”

I pa.s.sed the word along, but n.o.body went back in; once you've said your good-byes, that's just too hard. We stood around, not talking much, till the disksters showed up. I walked up the gentle slope of the gangplank and took my seat at the rear right, long-practiced hands strapping me in against the up-to-four-gee turns that these things could doa-or the up-to-ten-gee jumps if something went bang too close to you. When my three squads were all loaded and strapped in, I reported back to Burton. ”All right,” he said. ”Just a minute or so more for the disksters to pick up Bravo, and then we'll be in motion, finally. Looking bad.”