Under Strange Suns by Ken Lizzi Page B

aren’t there? Why’d you–what’s the phrase–muster out?”
    “I’ve done my bit, Captain,” Aidan said, his tone flat.
    “Hmmm, let me see. Thirty-one. Six feet tall?” Here she stopped and looked at him, head cocked to one side and an eyebrow raised. “Honesty is important at a job interview.”
    “Honestly,” Aidan said.
    She tilted her head to the other side, mouth twisted in a moue of disbelief.
    “In my socks. I’m six foot in my socks. Thick socks.”
    “Okay, we’ll let that go. Height isn’t a job requirement. Says here you spent only nine months in the military police. MP is a pretty good reference for a security position. Why so little time?”
    “Well, about three years back I was beginning to consider life after enlistment. The career options for a guy with about a decade on SF teams didn’t exactly blow my skirt up. So I dual-classed–switched my MOS to MP. Finished my training. I was nine months in when DC was scooped up and tossed into space to follow the planet around like a puppy.”
    “A Trojan puppy,” said Vance.
    “Excuse me, ma’am?”
    “Never mind, just an astrophysics joke. You know I saw it once? About twenty months ago I was bringing in a pair of asteroid mining barges, and we passed close enough to see it. Eerie–that big hemisphere in space topped with all those iconic structures just drifting in the blackness with the Earth as a backdrop. Couldn’t get too close. The military was warning off traffic. They had troops suited up, going through the buildings to collect papers and data and bodies and such.”
    “Yeah. When I went through OIT last year–what the Army calls Orbital Insertion Training–one of my instructors told me he did a tour on one of the recovery teams. Used the same word you did, ‘eerie.’ Said it was like being in a horror movie, all those empty, silent marble halls. Said he goes around a corner and a body bumps against him, its face all distorted, one of thousands of corpses bobbing along, colliding, spinning off through dead corridors.”
    They were both silent. Then Vance cleared her throat and expanded a notation on her desktop. “Yes, it does say here your last deployment was with a rapid reaction force. So you have been off-planet and do have at least minimal zero-g training, correct?”
    “Over the last two years, my life has consisted of two things–training and practical application. I’ve been thrown into damn near every retributive action we’ve undertaken since DC.”
    “Retributive action? That’s what they call it?”
    “‘Payback’ is considered an unprofessional term. Revenge. Panicked flailing. Going off half-cocked. Exterminating vermin. I’ve heard every description, probably used most of them myself.”
    “Which do you use now?”
    “I don’t know anymore. It’s hard to stay killing mad for so long.” Aidan was looking just past her shoulder but his eyes weren’t seeing the photo on the wall. “At some point, I guess I started wondering if our intel was one-hundred percent–if we were lighting up the bad guys, or just some poor bastards unlucky enough to be born in whatever shit-hole country we were currently rampaging through.”
    “Feeling a bit of compassion, Carson?”
    His eyes refocused on her. “Compassion? I don’t know. A lot of these places–Mali, Yemen, Eastern Turkey–the same people smiling and trying to sell you hammered copper bracelets in the daytime would dig up their AK’s at night and plant IEDs along your patrol route. Hard to feel compassion when you’re pretty sure most people outside the wire want to kill you. It was more wondering what the point was. What were we accomplishing?”
    Brooklynn nodded, and Aidan thought he saw comprehension in the gesture. Encouraged, he said, “Say we somehow managed to kill every last goat-buggering son-of-a-bitch responsible for launching DC into space. What then? What have we defended? What’s left of the world I was born into?” His eyes