Lieutenant Colonel Read online

  “Thirty seconds until Q-space insertion.”

  The final ten seconds were marked by a countdown. Lon held his breath until he felt the slight shudder of the ship as its Nilssens ratcheted to full power and drew a bubble of Q-space—in effect, a pocket universe just slightly greater in diameter than the longest dimension of the ship and theoretically tangent to every point in the “real” universe—around it.

  “Safe.” Lon was not concerned that he had spoken the word aloud. He was in Q-space, outbound from Earth. Safe. It was not important, at the moment, that he was still more than three weeks from home, from Dirigent. Every interstellar passage took fourteen days, or slightly more: five days out before the first jump, three days before the second and third jumps, and from three to five days from the final jump into the destination. And Lon had to go to Calypso before he could transfer to another ship, a DMC ship, to get to Dirigent. And his family.

  2

  Lon was surprised to learn that there were two staff floaters waiting for him at the civilian spaceport in Dirigent City. The explanation came quickly, though. Cavanaugh Zim had come in one from Corps headquarters to take the case of data chips off Lon’s hands.

  “We’ll do a full debriefing next Monday morning,” Major Zim told Lon. “And I have a message for you from Matt Orlis. He doesn’t want to see hide nor hair of you until after that.”

  “A full week off?” Lon asked. “Somebody gone soft?”

  “We’ll talk about it a week from today. Now, I’ve got to get back to work, and you’ve got better things to do.”

  It was at that moment that one door of the other floater—ground effect vehicle—flew open and Angie Nolan jumped out and ran toward her father. Three weeks from her tenth birthday, Angie was still happy being “Daddy’s little girl.” She squealed with delight as she jumped up to let him catch her and whirl her through a full circle. Angie was tall for her age but slightly below average in weight, blue-eyed and blond—her hair was nearly as light yet as it had been when she was a baby. She threw her arms around his neck and kissed his cheek, then pressed her cheek against his.

  “How’s my favorite girl?” Lon asked, easing her to the ground and prying her grip loose—with difficulty.

  “I’m first in my class again,” she announced.

  By that time, Major Zim’s car had pulled away and the other two passengers from the second vehicle were close—Sara and Lon, Junior. Junior was sixteen now; his birthday had come not long after his father had left for Earth. He hung back just a little. He did not want to seem too…effusive. Lon tousled Junior’s hair, then took Sara in his arms for a serious hug and a couple of long kisses. Junior looked away.

  “How was Earth?” Sara asked when the first rush of greetings was over.

  Lon shrugged, turning her toward the car. Angie took her father’s free hand. Junior trailed along behind.

  “Dirtier than I remembered, and more crowded,” Lon said. “Half a dozen small wars going on. Some people think the planetary government is losing all control. Maybe they’re right. My parents will be coming here to live. They’re probably already on the way.”

  “Gramma and Grampa?” Angie asked, excitement boiling out of her words. “Coming to stay?”

  “Coming to stay,” Lon agreed. Nothing had been said to the children before about Lon trying to get them to move, because he had been far from confident that he would succeed.

  “I was afraid you wouldn’t be able to convince them,” Sara said. “The letters we’ve had from them over the years. Your father always seemed so dead set against leaving Earth.”

  “It wasn’t easy talking him into moving,” Lon said. A porter had already transferred Lon’s bags to the rear compartment of the floater. The driver, a sergeant from the regimental motor pool, got out to hold the rear right door open for Lon and Sara. She got in first. “I think it was news about the battle in Panama City that turned the trick.”

  “Where?” Sara asked.

  “Panama City,” Junior said from the front seat. Angie had gotten in back on the left, next to her mother. “On the isthmus between North and South America, where the canal between the two oceans used to be.”

  “He’s right,” Lon said. “Militia forces of the Colombian district of South America and the Mexican department of the North American Union fought a major battle, more than ten thousand killed in four days of fighting. Both sides were hurt so badly that neither could honestly claim a victory, though both tried.”

  “Ten thousand?” Sara said.

  “The death toll was little more than a footnote in the news stories,” Lon said. “Earth’s population has gone back above six billion. If a hundred thousand had died, it might have rated a few cheers at least, but ten? That’s neither here nor there, as far as most people are concerned.”

  “That’s awful,” Sara said.

  “You won’t get an argument from me,” Lon replied. “Or from Dad. ‘Ten thousand killed and they don’t mention it until the last line of the story?’ he said—shouted—when the news came in. I couldn’t recall ever seeing him that angry.”

  The driver had not waited for instructions. As soon as all his passengers were in the floater, he had started driving, exiting the spaceport and taking Freedom Boulevard, the direct route from the spaceport across town to the main camp of the Dirigent Mercenary Corps. It was a ride Lon had made many times in his career. He felt no need to look out the windows. It was much more pleasant to sit with his arm around his wife, holding her close, reassuring himself that they were really back together again.

  “How long do we have to get things ready for your parents?” Sara asked, her mind going to practical matters.

  “Probably at least a couple of weeks. They were going to need a bit of time to wrap up things before they left. They might have left in the last day or two, or maybe not. But they’ll have to make two trips, just like I did. There aren’t any direct flights between Earth and Dirigent.”

  “Find them a small house here in the city? Or an apartment?”

  “A house. Mom wants to garden. She’s always grown flowers and a few vegetables. She was quite definite about that.”

  “A good neighborhood, fairly close,” Sara said. “And, as soon as we can after they get here, we’ll have to take them to Bascombe East to meet my folks.”

  Lon started chuckling. “We don’t have to start making plans this very minute. Give me at least a few hours to relax. What’s been happening here?” Not only had Lon been away for six months, he also had been completely out of touch for that time. There had been no chance to exchange message chips while he was undercover on Earth. It would have been far too deep a breach of security practices.

  Sara hesitated, trying to think back over what might interest Lon the most. Then she knew what she had to tell him. Bad news. “Matt Orlis’s older boy was killed on contract, not a month after you left. It was his first time out.”

  Lon closed his eyes for an instant. “Mark was just—what—nineteen?”

  “Nineteen,” Sara confirmed. “Matt and Linda still aren’t over it. I’ve done what I could, but…” She shrugged to show how helpless she had felt.

  “There’s not much anybody can do,” Lon said. Glancing at his son was an involuntary reflex, and so was the almost invisible shudder. Junior was doing everything but counting the days until he would be old enough to join the Corps. “I’ll go over to his place this evening.”

  “No, you won’t,” Sara said firmly. “Didn’t Cav tell you that Matt doesn’t want to see you until you report back for duty next week?”

  “Sure, but that was business. This is…different.”

  “No. It’s this, too,” Sara insisted. “Matt didn’t even want me to tell you about Mark until then.”

  Lon declined to continue that conversation just then. He couldn’t speak freely with the children close enough to hear. This was not the first time Lon had felt haunted by his own past. As a child on Earth, all Lon had ever wanted to be was a soldier
. It had taken him to The Springs, the military academy of the North American Union. Then, when the government decided to draft the top students from Lon’s graduating class into the federal police—duty that would have centered on preventing and putting down riots in the urban circuses, slums too densely populated by people who had lived on government largess for generations—Lon had conspired with the commandant of the military academy to escape that duty and go off-world, eventually to Dirigent, where he could fulfill his dream of being a soldier. All I ever wanted to be was a soldier: Lon couldn’t begin to estimate how many times he had uttered that sentence, or thought it. Now Junior kept saying virtually the same thing. All he wanted to be when he grew up was a soldier.

  It was the last thing his father wanted for him. I’ve seen too many friends die, Lon thought. I’d do anything I could to protect Junior.

  Short of shipping the boy off-world, to some colony where there were no soldiers, there was little Lon could do, except try to persuade his son to look elsewhere for a career, but as long as the father remained in the Corps, his arguments all fell short. And Lon knew it. Junior was sixteen now, and on his eighteenth birthday, he would be eligible to enlist in the Corps, whether or not his parents approved…and he had often announced his intention to do so, on that very day.

  “Why is it that whenever I get a few days off, I always seem to be busier than when I’m supposed to be working?” Lon asked Sara halfway through the week of furlough. They were waiting for the call to board the shuttle to Bascombe East with Junior and Angie. Right now, the children were busy. Angie was in the arcade, playing video games. Junior was sitting off by himself, reading on his portable complink, intent on whatever had caught his interest.

  Lon felt as if this were the first chance he’d had to sit and do nothing since getting home. The past three days had been busy, spent catching up on gossip and making arrangements for the arrival of his parents. Taking a couple of days to visit Sara’s parents was a natural part of the furlough. Lon enjoyed being around his in-laws, and the children always liked to visit the only grandparents they had ever known—except through recordings that came in letter chips a couple of times a year.

  Sara tried hard to suppress a laugh but failed. “Just balance, I suppose,” she said. “So you don’t forget what real work is like.”

  “Very funny.” Lon let out a long breath, noisily. “At least it looks as if it might be quite a while before the battalion goes out on contract. We’re not too near the top of the battalion or regimental rotas for assignment. Could have several months to help Mom and Dad get settled in and learn their way around Dirigent.”

  “You know, I was thinking last night, after you went to sleep,” Sara said, turning on the bench to look directly at her husband. “If you decided it was time to retire from the Corps and take over the pub, we could get your folks a place in Bascombe East, too, and we’d all be together.” Geoff and Mildred Pine, Sara’s parents, ran the village’s only pub, the Winking Eye. And Geoff had been making noises about retiring and turning the pub over to Lon and Sara since their marriage seventeen years before.

  Lon did not reply immediately. First he looked around to see where the children were. Then, almost in a whisper, he said, “If I thought that would be enough to get Junior’s mind away from joining the Corps, I’d do it in a second, but I don’t think it would work.”

  “No, probably not,” Sara said. Unlike Lon, Sara had long since accepted that there was little chance of diverting their son from the Corps. “Every boy wants to be like his father, and you’ve set high standards. Besides, this is Dirigent. The Corps is what we are, in a lot of ways. Without it, we wouldn’t have much of anything.” The Corps, and a thriving munitions industry that exported as much as it sold domestically, generated virtually all of the world’s income. The importance of the Corps found reflection in the fact that the head of the DMC was also the head of state for the planet.

  “With his intelligence, he could work in R&D, probably do more good for the Corps than he could do slogging through mud and getting shot at,” Lon said.

  “He figures he’ll have time to do both,” Sara replied. “Spend enough time in the Corps to learn just what ideas might be useful, then go off to a lab and turn ideas into practical gear.”

  That conversation lapsed because their flight was called. Sara gathered the children while Lon checked with the porter to make certain their baggage got aboard the shuttle.

  Lon polished pint beer glasses with a bar rag. He enjoyed giving his father-in-law a hand around the pub on visits. It helped Lon relax. In any case, the Winking Eye could not close just because family came to visit. The Nolans had been in Bascombe East a little over six hours. The pub was closed for the night. Junior was sweeping the floor. He wasn’t happy with the chore, but he had limited his complaints to a single groan of protest. Lon helped Geoff clean up behind the bar. Sara and Angie were in the pub’s kitchen helping Mildred clean up and get ready for the next day. The food served in the Winking Eye was all prepared fresh, not assembled from raw molecules in a food replicator. That was part of the allure of the Winking Eye.

  “Enough,” Geoff Pine said. He filled two glasses with his best beer and slid one of them in front of his son-in-law. “Take a swig of that, then we’ll go over and take a load off while the women finish in the kitchen.”

  Lon didn’t protest, and neither did Junior when his grandfather told him he could quit rearranging the dust.

  “I’m going outside for a few minutes,” Junior announced. Lon just nodded. There was little danger or trouble the boy could get into in Bascombe East.

  “So you’ve been on Earth all these months,” Geoff said when the two men were seated at a table near the front door. “Sara wouldn’t tell us where you’d gone, said it was all hush-hush.”

  “Officially, even she wasn’t supposed to know where I was,” Lon said. “Undercover stuff. But, yes, I was on Earth most of the time, except for the transit time, of course, a month each way.”

  Geoff shook his head, then took a long drink. “Earth belongs to the past. It’s not the future, hardly even the present. They don’t give a damn about us, and there’s nothing we need from them.”

  “Earth could give us a lot of trouble,” Lon said. “Maybe it’s just that I was looking at things with older eyes this time, or had a different perspective after twenty years away, but there’s a feeling of desperation to just about everything and everyone on Earth these days. Too many people, too little hope. A constant race against disaster.”

  “The final collapse they’ve been talking about for centuries?” Geoff asked, arching a skeptical eyebrow.

  Lon shrugged. “Let’s just say it wouldn’t shock me if civilization on Earth melted down.”

  “If it wasn’t for all the suffering people would do, I’d say good riddance,” Geoff said. “Find some way to lock Earth up in a Q-space bubble and let the rest of the galaxy get on with its business.”

  “I see your point, but it’s awfully hard for me to feel that way, even as an intellectual exercise.”

  “No, of course you couldn’t see it the way I do, lad. I’d be shocked if you did, coming from there and all. But the only thing Earth really has to offer the rest of us is trouble. They could start shipping off thousands of people to colony worlds, try to shovel their troubles off any way they could.”

  Lon managed a smile. “Part of the trouble is that they can’t possibly ship people out fast enough to make up for the population increase. If they had a thousand ships, each carrying a thousand people out-system every month, they could hardly make a dent in the situation, and there’s no way they can find the money or materials to do that.”

  “Used to be, Mother Nature took care of overpopulation,” Geoff said, leaning back. “War, pestilence, and famine. And science has pretty much taken care of two of those.”

  “Not entirely. There are people starving to death on Earth, even with food replicator technology being hundreds of years old. You
still need the raw materials to feed into the system.”

  “And people still know how to kill each other off,” Geoff said. He drained the last of his beer and stood. “That’s the shame of it, but if they didn’t, the problem would be even worse. I’m just glad it’s Earth and not Dirigent.”

  3

  Lon slept well Sunday night, after getting back to the family’s home on base in Dirigent City. Bascombe East and the Winking Eye always brought welcome relief to Lon. Someday he would take Geoff at his word and retire from the Corps to take over the pub. But not soon—at the moment, the pub was a good change of pace, an escape from the usual. That would change if it occupied his every day.

  Monday morning, Lon woke before his alarm could sound at six o’clock. He shaved, showered, and dressed while Sara fixed breakfast—first for him and then for herself and the children.

  “I’ll try to get home early this afternoon,” Lon told Sara. “The realtor has three places for me to look at for Mom and Dad. Maybe we can get to all of them today.”

  “If we don’t, we can take the rest of the week,” Sara said. She understood Lon’s excitement, and their children’s. To a certain extent she shared it.

  “The sooner we pick a place and finalize the contract, the sooner we can start getting it ready,” Lon said. “I want to have everything finished before they get here, and we don’t know when that will be.” A message from the ship when it came out of its final Q-space transit would give them just three days’ warning.

  “Yes, dear,” Sara said with mock resignation.

  • • •

  Lon took the shuttle bus that served the married officers’ section of the base to Corps headquarters instead of getting off at the stop it made near the edge of 7th Regiment’s area. He would have preferred to visit his office in 2nd Battalion first, talk to others on the staff, but his instructions were clear: Get the debriefing out of the way first.