With the Intrepid headed for the refit dock, I’ll have to spend two weeks in the Transient Personnel Unit, the purgatory on Gateway where people spend their time with busywork while they wait for their assigned ships to return from deployment. I’d almost rather do combat drops against the Lankies instead.
“Why don’t you burn up some of your leave, hop down to the old homestead?”
“I’ve used up all my leave for the year, Major,” I say.
“It’s January,” the major says. “You signed up in a January, didn’t you? Your next annual leave allowance comes available on February first. We won’t be at Gateway until February third. You need some downtime between drops, just like the machines.”
I was going to save up some leave time to spend with Halley, for whenever Fleet lets her take some time off, but then I remember that my girlfriend is stationed at Fleet School on Luna right now. Even if she can’t take any leave, I’ll at least be able to go up there on a personnel shuttle run to drop by for a visit.
“In that case, I guess I’ll put in for leave, sir. If I have to spend another day in the TPU counting towels, I’ll airlock myself.”
I’d love to share the news with Halley face-to-face, but vidcomms have to be scheduled ahead of time to conserve bandwidth, and she’s right in the middle of her workday at Fleet School. Instead, I dash off a message to her PDP across MilNet.
Do you have any downtime coming up? I’m coming back to Gateway for some enforced leave. I can come over to Luna for a visit if you want.
I send the message off to Halley and head back to my berth for some sleep.
When I wake up at the next watch change, I check the time on my PDP to find a new message on the screen.
>I have a full roster during the day, but I’m free in the evenings, and I get Sundays off. Hope you didn’t get any essential equipment damaged on that last mission of yours. Send me a message when you get to Gateway, and I’ll pick up my berth a bit and tell the CQ to expect you.—H.
I close the message and turn off my PDP with a smile.
Here we are, on the losing end of an interstellar war, with our world slowly falling apart around us, and I’m excited about going to see my girlfriend for a day or two. We may have gone from oar-powered galleys to half-kilometer starships in the span of two thousand years, but some things about humanity seem to be a universal constant, no matter the era.
It’s almost impossible for soldiers to have contact with anyone on Earth because the military’s network doesn’t talk to the civilian world for security reasons. They do let us send messages to direct relatives, though. My mother has a mailbox on the system as a “Privileged Dependent/Relative,” and she gets an hour or two of heavily restricted MilNet access per month. I know she treks down to the civil center every third Sunday of the month to collect her mail. Especially since during my first year of service, after Halley and I almost got killed on Willoughby when the Lankies made their first appearance, I started sending messages to my mother after a long dry spell of no communication.
At first I didn’t have all that much to say to her, so I used the mail system as a journal of sorts. After a while, she started sending entries of her own, telling me what was happening in her world. Mom is actually a good writer—she’s thoughtful and perceptive, and her updates let me see life in our old PRC in a whole new light. It’s a shame that I had to go into space and light years away from home to find out that my mother actually has opinions worth reading.
I compose a message on my PDP and tell my mother that I have leave coming up, and that I finally want to stop by for a visit Earthside. When I send the message out to Mom’s mailbox, I have the sudden urge to look for some sort of souvenir, something to bring back home for my mother as evidence of my activities, but when I look around in my berth, I realize that I don’t own a single thing that wasn’t issued to me by the military. Five years of sweating, fighting, and bleeding, with billions of kilometers traveled and over a hundred colony planets visited, and the only thing I have to show for it is a collection of colorful ribbons on my Class A smock and an abstract number in a bank account somewhere in a government computer. If I die in battle next month, there will be no evidence that I ever existed.
On the plus side, when everything you own can fit into a small locker, packing for a move is easy.
CHAPTER 5