“No. Certainly not. But you’d chosen to live on the Periphery, without healthcare, without a socially sanctioned means of support. You then chose to try to bargain with the Authority, to help your wife.”
“What would
“That’s not the question. You and I are completely different people, with different backgrounds, different experiences, different…programming. You made certain decisions. Some were good. Some were not as good. You need to figure out why you did what you did, why you made the choices that you made…and then you need to see where you go from where you are right now.”
“What does any of this have to do with me being on the flight line?” he demanded. “I’ve been doing my job. My
George leaned back in her seat, and appeared to be thinking about it. “Of course you have. No one is saying otherwise. But…do you understand the sort of responsibility with which you’ve been entrusted? What’s the typical warload on your Starhawk, when you go out on patrol? I think they used to call it a force package?”
He shrugged. “Depends on the mission parameters. Usually it’s anything between twenty-four and thirty-two Krait smart missiles. And we generally carry a PBP and a KK Gatling.”
“How big a punch on a Krait?”
“Again, it depends. We usually carry a mix, five to fifteen kilotons. More or less for special operations, special mission requirements.”
“So what happens if you get mad someday and fire off a fifteen-kiloton nuclear warhead while you’re still inside one of
“That would never happen!” He was angry at the mere supposition.
“Why not?”
“Well, there are interlocks to prevent that from happening, a munitions release inside the ship or an accidental warhead arming, for one thing. For another…well, damn it, if you don’t trust me with those things, why the hell did you turn me into a pilot?”
He’d actually wondered that for a long time. When he’d been taken into custody by the Peripheral Authority, he’d been handed over to the Department of Education for a series of skills downloads and aptitude testing. He’d scored high-“off the scale,” according to one of the soshtechs-in three-dimensional visualization, navigation, and conceptualization, plus lightning-quick reaction times and low fear thresholds. They’d fast-tracked him from an uneducated Periphery vagrant to pre-flight training level with downloads in spaceflight engineering, basic astronautics, and military history in six months of download hell. They’d followed that with a year of basic Navy OCS at the Academy, then flight training in California and on Mars.
The government had spent something like two thirds of a million creds to raise him from squatter to fighter pilot. And they didn’t
“It’s not about
“You mean when I decked Howiedoin’ at SupraQuito? That was handled NJP.”
“‘Non-judicial punishment.’ I know. It’s in your record.”
“So I did my time. Got scolded by the Old Woman, restricted to quarters, and lost a month’s pay.”
“But it was a bad decision on your part, wasn’t it?”
“The bastard had it coming.”
“And you’re getting angry and defensive right now, just talking about it. Am I right?”
He was about to tell George to shut up and get out of his face, then realized she was trying to provoke him, trying to prod an emotional reaction out of him. “Don’t tell me what I’m supposed to feel,” he said quietly. “My mind is still my own. So are my feelings.”
“Up to a point, Lieutenant. Up to a certain, and limited, point. What I’m trying to establish is that you boost down those launch tubes almost every day with more firepower at your fingertips than has been expended in all of the wars fought by Humankind since World War I. The jihadist nukes that took out the city centers of Paris, Chicago, and Washington were in the ten-to twelve-kiloton range. The one that got Tel Aviv was a little more, twenty kilotons or so. Your commanding officers-and the Confederation government-need to know that you
Fresh anger flared for an instant. His fists clenched. “Okay!” He forced his fists to relax, then said, more quietly, “Okay. Look, if I’m a risk, a threat to the Navy, kick me out! Send me back to the Periphery!”
“Is that what you really want?”
The reply stopped him cold.
The Authority might have been swinging its mass around when it brought him in, but the truth was that Trevor Gray had really started growing when he joined the Navy. Hell, you could romanticize the free life of the Periphery…but what “free life”
He missed his friends, the others in his TriBeCa Tower family. But in exchange, he’d received an education, social standing, implants, and a purpose…not bad for a filthy gutter kid from the Manhattan Ruins.
“It’s not about what I want,” he insisted, though the words sounded uncertain even to him. “Why even bring me in in the first place? I wasn’t bothering anyone out in the Ruins.”
“The Confederation is dedicated to bringing the benefits of technic civilization to all of its citizens,” she told him.
“Bull. They wanted someone who could fly Starhawks. If they don’t want me to fly, they can send me back to where they found me.”
“It’s not that easy, Lieutenant, and you know it. You-” She broke off in mid-sentence, listening.
“What is it?” Gray asked. She appeared to be receiving a base announcement of some sort. Gray’s in-head circuitry was attuned to the naval Net on board the
“It’s time for us to evacuate, Lieutenant,” she told him. “They’re ordering us topside, right now, to the transports.”
“So where does that leave me?”
“I’m recommending continued therapy, Lieutenant. With me, or with therapy teams on the
And he was dismissed. A Marine escort led him to the shuttle, and he never saw Anna George again.
He did know, however, that he was going to spend a lot of time thinking about just what it was he wanted out of the Navy, and about what the Navy wanted back from him.
Chapter Eleven
26 September 2404
“This way, Lieutenant,” said the escort, a young Marine corporal. The name showing high on the right chest of his combat armor was
