Fort Liberty, Volume Two Read Free Page B

heading his way. She probably owes him that much.
    And because it needs to be done. And because she wants to.
    Maybe there’s a chance of her surviving, but it’s slim, and to hold on too much just brings on desperation, when anger is what’s needed to avenge the injury, and tip the scale in a friend’s favor.
    Sometimes, it’s the idea of the future that’s got to be let go.
    And anyway…this is something like the end she expected, having earned as much, as both smuggler and killer in her right, though her reasons were maybe purer. This is what’s been sown.
    She presses her lips together, steeling the words inside. One warning, Voss. From me to you, gonna be time for one warning. For the sake of all you’re protecting, you better take it.

TRANSFER
    FORT LIBERTY
    OPHIR CHASMA REGION
    MARS DATE: DAY 25, MONTH 12/24, YEAR 2225
     
    A soft chime sounds in the darkness, two-tones, one high, one low, ascending in a way that tries to be cheerful, but settles into desperation given enough time. Voss lets it go for another minute, awake but slow to respond, slow to accept the hour for what it is, which has become routine.
    He lies there, on a rack with a soft white mattress because Red Filter compartments don’t come without, and winces at the pain of ageing muscles worked over in the simulators, the ache of old joints, pieces of human machinery torn, broken and repaired too many times to remain perfectly still now, even during sleep.
    Age. Maybe that’s part of it. But he knows there’s more.
    “Awake,” he admits, and the chime shuts off. Dusky light filters in from the two simulated windows in his compartment, each offering equally commanding views, golden slices of the Valles Marineris Canyon taken from the top of Fort Liberty Tower.
    Of course, he’s not in the tower.
    He’s in a basement, at best, and real windows (if they were in a position to offer an outside view) would reflect a few meters of dark basalt, a perpetual night of olivine rock, its porous, potholed mass shot through with flecks of white crystal, or silvery blooms of cold iron.
    Doesn’t matter. The compartments of average citizens all have the same artificial windows, which offer all the same selectable views, and it might be possible to tell something about a person who chooses the open plain over the towering ridges, or the clear night over the hazy glow, or the one who deviates and selects jungles with waterfalls on a planet that has neither.
    Voss hasn’t selected anything beyond his own waking times. The compartment does what it does. It offers him food, and he refuses it most of the time. It makes environmental adjustments for whatever preferences it observes, and he couldn’t care less.
    It offers soothing suggestions when he rips awake from a nightmare, and he curses under his breath, wishing he could punch it into permanent silence. The dreams aren’t a new thing, but the intrusion of another voice---with its idiotic preprogrammed wisdoms---is.
    His previous tour at Fort Liberty had been short, and ceremonial, as a uniformed campaign ornament with all the appropriate medals, paraded around at the behest of Rhys Corporation, and housed in one of their Spartan quarters. No pretense of windows. No auto-attendant. The dreams came all the same, but he woke to silence, which was a luxury he didn’t fully appreciate at the time.
    He gets the same dreams on Earth, but not often, because they simply never happen in full kit, flying through chop, when the seat’s bouncing, and every guy on the team is knocked out because the fight’s still a few hours away. They don’t happen between missions, when he’s training or planning, coaxing numbers out onto grids, waiting for the moment that green light comes.
    Those are on-times, body and soul, and nothing hurts.
    The aches and pains, the nightmares, that all happens when it’s quiet, when the air is too clean, and the mattress is too soft, and the sounds that are supposed to be there…