There are plants and shellfish in the seas of Stalleybrass, but the continents are wastes of sand with no indigenous life except lichen. Existence on Stalleybrass is viewed as a penance by all the humans stationed there.
I have been thinking a great deal about penance since I made my decision to retire.
“Not for myself directly,” I said. “The Maxus 377 expeditionary force has returned to Stalleybrass.”
Chun nodded grimly. “An expensive bit of bad luck for us,” she said, “but not nearly as expensive as it would have been if the Kalendru fleet had arrived immediately after our landing instead of immediately before. There would have been tens of thousands of casualties among troops on the ground while Admiral Gage fought off the enemy—if he in fact was able to do that. If the Kalendru had pushed Gage out of the system, the entire landing force would have been lost.”
“A .2 probability,” I agreed. “Instead we lost only twenty-six personnel.”
“Deaths as a result of enemy action,” Miss Chun said in the interests of precision. “There were a hundred and five accidental fatalities during the voyage and return, though of course the serious costs were logistical.”
“The serious costs to the Unity were logistical,” I said, precise in turn. “And our duty is to the Unity. But Miss Chun—have you considered the problem of reintegrating former combat personnel into civilian society?”
Miss Chun stiffened almost imperceptibly. She was wondering if my mental condition hadn’t deteriorated abruptly after all. “I’m aware that the problem exists, sir,” she said. “It appears to me as inevitable as the danger posed by lightning storms. Neither threatens society as a whole because of the relative rarity of the event.”
“They aren’t criminals in the normal sense,” I said. “The likelihood of a former combat soldier violating laws for the sake of gain is significantly lower than that of a non-veteran doing the same thing. The risk is that they may react with extreme violence to social constraints on their behavior.”
Miss Chun walked to her console in the corner. Even with an implant the amount of information one can absorb is limited. Until now Miss Chun had scanned only a summarized report on the Maxus 377 expeditionary force. She called up the full data, from inception to the present.
I had viewed the same file a few minutes before she entered the office.
Interlude: Stalleybrass
Because the driver was afraid of getting into trouble, the surface-effect truck slowed only to about twenty miles an hour. Abbado and his strikers had inserted from vehicles moving a lot faster than that. They unassed from the right-side cargo door, the side opposite the enlisted personnel club, and landed without even bothering to roll.
Methie stumbled because the leg burned at Active Cloak hadn’t fully healed on the voyage back. Glasebrook kept him from tumbling.
The driver accelerated, leaving a wake of dust stirred from the barren landscape by the truck’s stub wings. He’d tried to argue 3-3 out of hiding in the back as he deadheaded to the port, but he’d given in when Abbado insisted. The driver’s kid brother had been a striker in B-4 before he was killed.
“All present and accounted for, Sarge,” Horgen said. Abbado waited till the pall of fine red powder had settled a little, then tugged down the kerchief he’d tied over his nose and mouth to filter some of the solids out of the local atmosphere.
Abbado didn’t want them to look as though they’d come to stick the place up. They just wanted a beer or two—dozen. He and his six strikers sauntered in line abreast across the “street,” a hundred-foot channel between buildings. There wasn’t a lot of traffic, but twice they had to wait for a vehicle to pass in the other direction.
The club had been converted from a warehouse like those to either side of it. The unit insignia painted over the door was too dusty to be legible. A Sergeant 4th Class watched through a clear window as 3-3 approached. He looked pissy.
Abbado didn’t blame the locals for being in a bad mood. Glasebrook must have been thinking the same thing because he said, “You know, I think I’d eat my gun before I’d let them stick me here in the permanent garrison.”