Spin State - Chris Moriarty [106]
“You don’t go in for the smart tattoos, huh?” McCuen said, pointing to the baby blue UNSC on her left shoulder.
She’d gotten the tattoo along with her whole platoon sometime during the wild week of drinking that had followed her first live-fire action. The names of her fellow initiates had slipped out of soft memory, but she still felt the cold sharp sting of the needle, could still see the intent face of the dockside tattoo artist bent over his work.
“Good thing it’s not on the other arm,” McCuen said. “Scar would have gone straight through it.”
Li twisted to get a glimpse of the blue letters, the first time she could remember looking at them in years. She grinned, acutely aware of the clichéd ridiculousness of the tattoo. “Perish the thought!”
She’d set up the Security-personnel physical-training program for fun more than anything else, and any benefit to on-station morale was a side perk. The main point of the sessions was that they created an at least arguably official excuse to round up the half dozen Security personnel on-station and tussle. She wasn’t going to give them some line of crap about how practicing carefully choreographed moves with a line soldier whose internals were powered down was going to open up glorious new career opportunities. She just set a time, showed up, and left it at that. If they wanted to come, they could. If they didn’t, they didn’t.
And McCuen had wanted it. Wanted it enough to show up, morning after morning, and take the punishment she doled out. He was on fire, a single track of idealistic ambition. When she worked with him Li could feel the old heat coming on, the sharp edge of a happiness she hadn’t felt since long before Metz. If she could get him a ticket off Compson’s, she caught herself thinking, maybe her time here wouldn’t be a dead loss after all.
“You’ve really never been back here since you enlisted?” he asked, as they worked on the footing for a particularly complicated throw Li was trying to teach him. “Why not? Bad memories?”
Li loafed over to the side of the mat, took a drink of water, wiped her face and hands. “Not really. Just never had a reason to.”
“No family?”
She hesitated. “Not that I know of.”
They worked through the move a few more times in silence, McCuen picking it up quickly and grinning with delight when Li finally let him throw her at something like full speed—an indulgence she knew was a mistake the moment her sore shoulder hit the mats.
“No family makes it easier, I guess,” he said, picking up where they’d left off. “My parents aren’t so hot on the Corps. They’ve been reading about wetware side effects, jump amnesia.” He smiled and shrugged, trying to pass off the concern as his parents’, something only old people would worry about. Li answered the implied question anyway.
“If you cooperate with the psychtechs and back everything up carefully, you shouldn’t forget much. Otherwise . . . sure, you can lose a lot. But even if something goes wrong, it’s not the way it was ten years ago. They’ve been minimizing jumps, moving personnel around much less. Even enlisted troops. Hell, you could pull a permanent assignment on one planet, never jump more than a half dozen times in your whole career. If the peace holds.”
“If the peace holds. That’s the kicker, isn’t it?”
“What do you want?” Li asked, amused to hear herself echoing Haas’s words of a few weeks ago. “Promises?”
A flush bloomed behind McCuen’s freckles. “That’s not what I meant. It’s just . . . the war gave a lot of colonials a chance to prove themselves. People like you. People who would never have gotten a shot at command in peacetime. Now that’s gone. And back home it’s even worse. We’ve got the multiplanetaries doing business with the Syndicates, trading away what few jobs there were on Compson’s for locals. There are mines on the southern hemisphere that already have