King's County Read Free Page A

the shoulder. This was
unusual. Nobody would mess with a pilot while he's strapped in to
the equipment with a craft in the air. I turned around to see Major
standing there, looking oddly happy. It was unsettling to see him
like this. Off to his office we went.
    "Lt. Waller." That unpleasant smile
came out again. "You've flown 189 missions with our detachment.
Does that sound about right?"
    "I suppose. I haven't kept
track."
    "You don't check your statistics?" He
frowned and looked down at his tablet screen. Pilots all pretended
to not give a shit about the statistics. "I find that highly
unusual, Lt. Waller."
    "Yes, sir."
    "Well, other people have kept track.
Did you know that in those 189 missions you have not lost a single
drone GAF?"
    I did know. It was a point of pride
with me. I think we all kept at least a loose mental record of our
statistics and, to be honest, I did peek at the official stats more
than once.
    "We’re a little late...unfortunately.
At achieving 175 clean flights, pilots are now being selected for
special consideration - special training. Congratulations,
Lt."
    This is how I wound up going to
space.
    *
    AK 2092
    We sat around a thickly chromed bar
built into the side of the cliff-like wall. The club was circular
and deeply set into the earth. The part above ground was mostly
buried in snow. The ceiling was rounded, dark, sparsely lit with
thousands of brilliant pinprick white lights, and it came to a
point at the top like an onion. The place was incredibly vast. At
the farthest point across, through a considerable haze of smoke,
the people looked like tiny spastic wax figures. When the smoke in
the air got too thick, from far below, a burp of clean air rushed
upward and flushed the smoke out of a little aperture at the onion
tip.
    The music was of an ambient sort,
seemingly typical nightclub garbage, but actually densely complex.
The closer you'd listen, the more layers of detail you'd hear.
Sitting around talking and drinking, I could only hear the
throbbing bass and synth beat. After Geake went to the head,
without the distraction, I heard women singing, drums and guitars
then, even deeper, a swirling, ecstatic orchestra.
    We weren't supposed to be here. It's
not that the Army explicitly forbid it. There was no code that said
soldiers on leave couldn't go to nightclubs in wild frontier boom
towns. Just that virtually anything we might do there was, you
might say, frowned upon. We were free to drink, take drugs, whore
around, or whatever - but it was considered bad form, at best
inappropriate, and so few did.
    I picked up on this quickly. I wasn't a
stupid kid anymore. It was a narrow road the Army was walking to
hold everything together. They had no real mission. This could
never be made obvious. There had to be strict control of the men.
As there were no natural incentives for serving, no real enemy,
Army policy had to provide for a balance of comfort and belonging
along with a subtle underlying fearfulness of nonconformity. And
they always offered something, sometime in the future, for those
who played along to look forward to. And if you didn't fit in, you
had to go. They didn’t mess around with that. I knew I wouldn't
last long.
    Our bartender’s hair was in a long
rope-like braid over her left shoulder. When she leaned in to give
us our drinks the braid came alive. A snake’s head emerged from the
end and hissed and snapped at us.
    "Ha!" She clearly had done this before
and enjoyed it. "Don't worry, he’s harmless. Really freaks out the
day trippers. You guys military?"
    "How'd you know - Listen, the kid here
wants to get laid. Are we in the right spot for that?"
    "Wait, El-Tee, I didn't come here for
that."
    "Geake, what's the matter? I know
you're not...whatever."
    Truth be told, I wasn't surprised he'd
balk at getting a girl but that was the main reason I'd brought him
here. I wouldn't give up easily.
    We’d hitched a ride on a military
supply craft. Ruth was a mining town, the mining