“That’s not my job!”
“Your job’s snow removal. Now get it done fast or we won’t be ready when the next flight returns. And if that happens, it’s on your head!” The man slammed the door shut, which proceeded to bounce back open again, and ran with short steps to a snow truck whose warm windows were steaming up. He climbed in, and the truck soon disappeared into the blizzard.
Amata gritted his teeth. “Fuckers,” he seethed. The ground crews treated him and the men in his unit like slaves, forcing the cold shit-work off on them. He quickly radioed the word to the other drivers. They all bitched but quickly gave in and accepted the situation. They didn’t have the will to argue at that point. Better to just finish the job quickly.
The lieutenant pulled up the hood of his parka, left the grader idling, and got out. He didn’t turn the intermittent starter on. He was being as uncooperative as he could.
He tried to unhook a shovel from the front of the truck, but the detent was caked with ice and wouldn’t move. He got a plastic hammer from his toolbox and smashed at the ice. Tiny ice chips flew up into his face. Remembering there were goggles in the toolbox as well, he returned the hammer to it and then put the goggles on. Then, taking the shovel in hand and feeling for the arresting cable with his foot, he made his way toward the storage trench.
All around him was total whiteness. The snow blew at him mercilessly. It was hard to breathe. He dug into the trench. He began to sweat. His goggles fogged up. Taking them off, he wiped at the insides with his glove, but they soon fogged up again. He threw the shovel aside and furiously starting digging at the snow with his hands. The other members of his unit were probably kicking back with their own stashes of hooch, letting him deal with the task. He knew most of them were alcoholics. They couldn’t fly fighters and they had no advanced skills, so they were almost universally looked down on by the rest of the FAF, and many of them had internalized the same sense of worthlessness.
Conscious of the pain in his side, Lieutenant Amata pulled the collapse lever. The arresting gear went down. However, a bit of ice still jammed in the fulcrum left the gear poking slightly out of the ground. The lieutenant raised the mechanism again, took off his gloves, and began beating the snow off of it. His hands immediately lost all sensation.
At that moment, he was so jealous of the fighter pilots it made his gut burn. They got to fly off of this snow- blasted landscape and rise above the clouds, where the weather was always clear. No way they could ever understand what it was like for the poor slobs below them freezing on the white ground. He had wanted to be a pilot too, but his bad liver washed him out on the hypoxia resistance test. In other words, the only job for him here was this. He’d been called a waste of a human being, and he had agreed. The same went for all the other guys in his unit. They were sneered at and paid less than the pilots, and even what little pay they received was frequently docked for conduct violations — like drinking on the job.
Last year one of the members of his unit had frozen to death trying to haul a broken-down plow off of the runway during a violent blizzard. The brass kept harping on the dead man’s case, saying that it should serve as a warning to the rest and that it wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t been drinking. Well, of course he was drinking; it was the only means they had to warm themselves up a little and make it easier to move.
Lieutenant Amata lowered the gear again. It still stuck up a little. He beat at it with the shovel, then climbed on top of it and jumped up and down to force it closed with his body weight. That got it.
Snow snuck in through the storm seals of his pants, melted, and mixed with his own sweat. He shivered at the clammy, unpleasant feeling, tramped back to the grader, threw the shovel into the cabin, then climbed in and shut the door. Cold wind was still blowing in through the gap, but it was better than being out there. His parka was now a frozen, crunchy mass. He flipped back the hood, spilling snow over the driver’s seat, and held his frozen hands over the defroster until some of their strength returned. He gripped the large steering wheel and threw the truck into gear.
After finishing his work, Lieutenant Amata drove back to the ground vehicle hangar on the side of the runway. The electric shutter door closed automatically behind him, cutting off the howling of the storm. Once he’d killed the grader’s engine, it was quiet except for the sound of the snow blowing against the shutter. He climbed down from the cab, his breath coming out in clouds of white steam that looked like cigarette smoke. The moisture in his now- thawed parka began to refreeze. He thoroughly beat off the snow and ice clinging to him. If it was still on him when he went into the warm locker room, he’d be soaked.
He stripped out of his cold weather gear in the locker room. It stank of sweat. He was chilled to the bone, yet steam still rose from his body when he took off his sweater. The locker room was warmer than the garage, but only by about ten degrees. He wondered if it was the first ten degrees above freezing but had no way to check. The air grew warmer as he made his way to the station. From the outside, to the garage, to the locker room, to the corridor, to the station: warmer and warmer as he went. He’d been told that sudden changes in temperature were physically harmful, but he still wished they would keep the locker room warmer. He walked into the showers, stripped off his soaked undergarments, and threw them down the laundry chute.
After the shower he finally started to feel better. He grabbed a towel and underwear from the supply box, dried off, and got into his fatigues. He went down the corridor to the unit’s command office, dropped off his grader’s key with his superior officer, and then gave a simple report that his work had been completed. Just as he was about to walk out with one of the other men in his unit, the officer called for them to wait.
“Sure, whatever,” Lieutenant Amata mumbled.
He probably wanted them to stay on standby there in the station; the weather geeks in the Operations Corps had forecast a big storm. He felt like this was somehow, obscurely, their fault. Sometimes he even wondered if they got such heavy snow only because those fuckers made such awful forecasts.
The officer didn’t put them on standby, though. In fact, he only wanted Lieutenant Amata and told the other man that he was free to go. The other guy whispered “Brass must be pissed at you” into Amata’s ear as he passed, gave him a sympathetic look, patted him on the shoulder, and left the office.
“Now then,” began his superior, Captain Gondou. “I have some surprising news for you. Would you like to sit down, Lieutenant Amata?”
“No thanks,” he replied. He refused both the chair and the cigarette he was offered and remained standing at attention.
Captain Gondou put the cigarette in his own mouth, lit it, and sat down again behind his desk. He regarded Amata for a while, then blew out a large cloud of smoke and said, “A commendation’s been awarded.”
“I see,” answered Amata. Someone in his division was getting a commendation, so they probably wanted him to set up a party to celebrate. That was the only thing he could think of. “Understood. Where’s the assembly? And when?” He figured he could bully some of his good-for-nothing, lazy-ass coworkers into helping out.
The captain was looking at him oddly. “What’s your problem, Amata? You don’t seem very excited about this.” He held his gaze for a second longer, then shrugged. “It’ll be held tomorrow at Auditorium 1 in Faery Base, as part of the FAF founding memorial ceremony.”
Captain Gondou put his cigarette down on the ashtray, stood up, straightened his uniform, and saluted. “Congratulations, Lieutenant Amata.”
Amata reflexively returned the salute. Then it suddenly dawned on him what the captain had meant. “Wait, what? Hold on here. Um...
“What did you think I meant?”
Gondou sat down and picked up the cigarette butt from the ashtray. The five or six other personnel in the office stared at Lieutenant Amata. An intercom chimed on somebody’s desk somewhere, and the tense atmosphere returned to normal.
“What’s the deal, Captain? This must be some sort of mistake.”
“That’s what I thought,” Gondou replied bluntly. “At first I couldn’t believe it either.”
Amata took no particular offense at the captain’s attitude. Looking back over his service record, he didn’t think there was anything in it that was particularly outstanding compared to those of his coworkers. He nervously fingered the whiskey flask in his pocket. He wasn’t any different from the rest of his drunken colleagues. Just a
