That unspoken pact with nighttime. Shrugging off that call for all inside, all to sleep to wait till daytime. But the reality of it, the mystery, that dark romance of night skies and night stars, bright full moons, your own world made unfamiliar by night dark and no color. And, out there in the country, far from the light pollution of any gaping metropolis, the golden band of the galaxy up there, hung on the backdrop of the closed-lipped universe, both impossible and immediate, the possibility versus the actual, the same sky, more or less, that every man who ever lived has looked upon. Constellations half-remembered from grade school, patterns invented by men when in truth there was nothing up there but a pale glow, distance, and nothing. Light is just the waste of stars. No bears and winged horses made from pinpoints. Just mean gas balls waiting to implode or explode, to die into itself or indulge one last rampage, swallowing whole anything in its path, hungry for mass. And planets too harsh to name. Oceans of boiling methane. Gas cocktails so noxious you'd die before you could ask the question. Bright spots that would blind you in a moment. A cold, smoky vacuum to suck you dry, lest one of the giant beasts of the system suck you in with lazy gravity, burnt in the atmosphere to ash and elements, raining down into unknown oceans, maybe creating life a billion lightyears from here, maybe an ultimate fate as an unheard, unfelt ripple in a placid sea. The promise of intelligent life unintelligible to us. Not kings upon thrones with armies and nobility, but ant-people and tusked snake-dogs. No different than going into the jungle and trying to talk to monkeys. Impossible but necessary. Our duty to our last god.
I
went for walks at night.
I
had never been on an Army or Forces base before, and my expectations were a bit
skewed. I knew it was situated on a large-enough plot of land for live-fire
exercises and mock plywood-and-cinderblock cities, but the rest? Sheer naked
space. You couldn't even see the fences. I didn't even know if there were
fences, was barely awake when we first arrived. At the least, I expected sparse
traffic along the main road, trucks hauling ammunition or recruits or supplies,
some dropships making dry-runs, something other than the great giant nothing
that existed outside the barracks in that liquid memory of that brief eternity
spent at The Base With No Name.
Our
Drills and Classroom ended at eight, after which we were given the nights to
ourselves. Next-day activities started between ten and twelve; plenty of free
time to do whatever we wanted. Some guys holed up in the Base library, others
went for runs, some hit the weight room or the range. Pointman always
disappeared, probably back to the barracks to transcribe the day in his
journal. Not like anyone wrote any letters home, though. Who would we send them
to? Dead relatives? Families who had probably already adjusted to our various
absences? To bulldozed houses in rezoned suburbs? The guys in the Unit never
betrayed any of those possibilities. I never saw anyone head for a mailbox;
never even saw if there was a mailbox.
Not
even Caf followed me out at night. The ground was dead flat miles in all
directions, excluding the pitted woods. The moon was bright but I still carried
a red-lens flashlight, the beam bouncing along the ground with each step, a
communicator scragged to my collar in case, well, in case they needed me for
something.
Each
night I picked a direction and walked. Sort of a mental endurance test, knowing
that each step I took was another I had to take back. Counting time in my head,
watching the stars. I never cared much for that Void overhead. That was my
dad's territory. I was a terrestrial, a son of earth, always would be. Shuttles
heading up to LEO or to the waystation at the moon base were no more special
than airplane lights gliding off in the distance, careful to mind our forbidden
borders.
Almost
a year in, itching for deployment, and I'd been drilled so hard I didn't walk
anywhere without a knife and my AP. Probably about as close to any Reg Forces
habit as any. The Base, still, seemed built only for us. As far as we could
tell, there was only some skeleton personnel, our Instructor, vets turned into
Classroom teachers, the stern rangemen, maybe their collective CO, and the
twelve of us in 716. The grounds crew clipped the grass for us, maintained the
programming on the sprinklers, touched up the paint on a building if the sun
cracked a coat, whatever. A year in, and the paint still seemed wet, the sod
still lumpy, like the whole of the Base had been forgotten.
I
try looking back on it without any sort of mental inflection. It was. It happened. It was far less boring than the sort of things my brother told me
they made you do. No War Two-era punishment like peeling potatoes (never
happened to my brother; just saying), no getting smoked by a zealous DI, no
three-a.m. wake-ups for a bullshit road march or firewatch, no agonizing waits
at the firing range while the Cadre policed it up and reset it for another
squad, no purgatory of days-long Orientation where you catch whatever disease
is going around, usually bronchitis for some reason, too many guys back from
the desert and too many headed there. But not us.
Out
on the practice slopes, in position by a dry creek bed, Terra's rotation as
leader, one step along the hard mud before our Instructor reminded us of
natural lines of drift and how to avoid them, lest you walk right into an enemy
position anticipating such poor patrolling discipline.
"Excuse
me," said Terra, the absence of "sir" a reflex by now.
"Yes?"
said the Instructor.
"Isn't
this, uh, counter to the terrain we'll encounter?"
"How
so?"
"Because
we'll be in, you know, the desert?"
"You
won't be in the desert, Terra. It's a new war. New terrain. Not much different
than here. Now are you going to move your squad or what?"
At
the end of the Drill, we hooked up IR lights in a big rope-tied Y and signaled
in the dropship. Our rides were always piloted by an older Reg dude, usually
drinking coffee out of an insulated mug, like that was retirement or something.
I was scared of heights even after I got used to drops. I always prayed they'd
close the landing flap - they never did - lest I see the earth rush past a
thousand feet below, good enough to entertain the self-snuffing thought of
releasing a single harness clasp on a banked turn and float out there before
the ground snarfed me up.
And
a few minutes later, that low hover that smashed the grass flat, made it hard
as rock, 716 spit out a hundred yards in every direction as we got out for one
last tactical spread before we called it a night and went our separate ways.
(Chapter 24 coming Monday, January 9, 2012.)
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