Steel Walls and Dirt Drops Read Free

delay at the mirror should give the troopers on duty time to sort out who she might be and which trooper should be on his feet and at the gate to greet her.
    Unofficially, gate duty was designed to have a friendly face greeting returning APES. It was also a time to meet troopers in other commands, tell war stories, trade gossip, make new friends and network. However relaxed it might become, most troopers made sure the right trooper was available at just the right time so a returning APE wouldn’t even break stride passing through the gate. Delaying an APE at the gate was traditionally bad form. Delaying a command level APE at the gate, even seconds and thirds, might land a lazy trooper on a punishment detail: scrubbing toilets, shuffling mobility pallets, or scraping the bottom of the combat skid plates.
    Misha had no desire to start her new command by jumping down the throat of the first trooper in her unit she met. She was more than a little surprised to see that only an AMSF spacer stood to greet her. She could see small clusters of APES troopers behind the gate, many of them looking decidedly nervous. However, none of them stepped up to the gate. The spacer, a young, absolutely tiny woman, glanced behind her at the knot of troopers and shrugged helplessly.
    Misha halted at the gate entrance, neither remaining outside the area nor stepping in as her bulky size blocked the gate entrance. Misha shrugged back and said, “Third-Level Commander Hamisha Ann McPherson reporting for deployment aboard the AMSF spacecraft Kiirkegaard.” She handed the young woman her glass-pack. The spacer slid the glass-pack into the slot on her command board and pressed the big green 'go' button.
    The glass-pack was a leaded crystal rectangle about three inches by two inches and only a n insignificant fraction of an inch thick. Data was stored at a molecular level and transferred by light code at light speed. Each subset of stored data was encrypted and buried behind a maze of firewalls, thus insuring that when a user dropped the glass-pack into a slot the reader could only access authorized data for the specifically requested data transfer.
    Misha’s glass-pack, like everyone’s, contained her whole life, private, professional and archival. It held enough copies of books, plays, and movies to stock a small planetary library. It held all of her photo-images and mail from home. It held her financial and banking records, small as they were. It also held her orders the Kiirkegaard deployment orders and the orders authorizing her to take command of the 1392nd.
    Glass-packs could automatically transmit appropriate codes without inquiry or comment, but certain military traditions remained sacrosanct. Reporting to a new duty station had its own set of rules having nothing to do with any available technology. Faster than either could have requested the data verbally, the command board queried the glass-pack, which responded equally fast with the appropriate answer.
    The command board’s resident hologram image was a twelve-inch high AMSF General in full-dress uniform. It popped into existence and hovered a few inches above the board. Speaking loud enough for every trooper in the area to hear and in a clear well-modulated voice, it said, "Welcome aboard, Third McPherson. Proceed to hangar E-315, please.” The little man blinked out before Misha could say thank you.
    The diminutive spacer said, “Yes, ma’am. Let me locate your trooper.” She handed Misha back her glass-pack.
    Misha smiled to put the young girl at ease. “Thank you, Spacer Second Class . It is second class, is it not?”
    The girl blushed. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen, even accounting for the delayed aging GerinAid injection. She was obviously on her first term of enlistment and just out of boot camp. “Um, yes ma’am. It's Morin, um…Spacer Second Class Brianna Morin.” The girl almost saluted, but halted her arm midway up, remembering at the last moment that