1
Although Christmas was a week past, a decorated tree still sat in one corner of the Nolan living room. Each of the three strings of lights was guaranteed to include bulbs of 120 distinct colors. They twinkled in unpredictable sequences and combinations—“Like snowflakes, no two patterns will ever be exactly alike,” the advertisement had promised. The only other light in the room came from the screen of the entertainment console. For the past three weeks, Dirigent City’s special-events channel had been offering holiday music of the last thousand years. Although there was video to go with most of the selections—performance, dramatic, or simply mood—Lon had muted the monitor to leave only the dark blue background of a vacant screen.
Lon Nolan and his wife, Sara, were sitting on the sofa, snuggled close. For the moment, their attention had been diverted from hypnotic staring at the tree lights to watching the timeline on the entertainment console as it counted down the seconds of the final minute of the year 2829. Lon, Junior, stood leaning against the mantel of the room’s decorative fireplace, a bottle of beer in his left hand. Junior had been nursing the same bottle for nearly an hour. When the countdown reached twenty seconds, he set the beer on the mantel and straightened up. Although he was not in uniform, Junior stood almost at attention. He was nearly two inches taller than his father now, and perhaps five pounds heavier. As a boy, Junior had appeared to be the image of his father; now he seemed to favor his mother more, at least through the face. His complexion was lighter than his father’s, even though his face was tanned and beginning to show the weathering of a life spent largely outdoors.
The screen of the entertainment console came to life then, programmed earlier by Lon, Senior. The several hundred couples who were seeing the new year come in at the grand ballroom of Corps Headquarters had stopped dancing. They were counting down the last seconds. The band on the stage at the east end of the ballroom was ready to jump straight into the traditional music for welcoming the new year.
“Happy New Year!” the master of ceremonies shouted at the appropriate second. Balloons, streamers, and confetti filled the air at the grand ballroom. The band launched 2830 with “Auld Lang Syne,” a song whose origins had been partially lost in the mythology that had grown up around it when the song had been chosen as the accompaniment to the start of the journeys of early colony ships leaving Earth.
Lon and Sara welcomed the new year with a long kiss. Sara twisted around on the sofa until she was almost sitting in her husband’s lap. Junior turned half away, as if distancing himself from the demonstration of parental emotion. He occupied himself by finishing the beer on the mantel. It was almost room temperature by now.
The new year was a full minute old when Junior cleared his throat and said, “I’ve got a taxi on order for quarter past.”
That interrupted his parents. Sara got up from the sofa and took a step toward her son. “Your sister won’t be home yet,” she said.
Junior shrugged. “I promised some friends I’d meet them in Camo Town. They’ll be more than half plotched by now, but they’ll remember enough if I don’t show up at all. Besides, they’ll need someone around who’s going to stay at least halfway sober to get back to barracks by dawn.”
His father was slower to get up from the sofa, but put his hands on Sara’s arms as if to keep her from going to their son. “I appreciate you seeing in the new year with us,” Lon said.
Junior shrugged again. “There haven’t been all that many years when we’ve all been together for the holidays.” He grinned. “And this time it’s Angie who’s missing, after all the times she moaned when you were away on contract, and she sure let me know how she felt when I was off on contract last year.”
“Oh, it’s not the same,” Sara said. “Angle’s just out for a few hours. We were all together for Christmas, and all your grandparents as well.”
“I know, Mama,” Junior said, crossing and giving her a serious hug—picking her off the ground with ease. “But you can bet I’m going to use it just the same.” He grinned as he let her go.
“Stay out of trouble, Junior,” Lon said.
Junior’s grin threatened to become a laugh. “Don’t worry, Dad. I’m not about to do anything you’ll have to convene a court-martial for. They don’t call me ‘Old Sober-sides’ for nothing.” The two had quit hugging the day Junior had put on the uniform of the Dirigent Mercenary Corps. He had enlisted as a private shortly after his eighteenth birthday, seen combat, then been chosen for officer training. Eleven months earlier, he had earned his lieutenant’s pips after seeing combat as an officer cadet. Now he was a platoon leader in Delta Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Regiment. His father was the regimental commander, a full colonel and member of the Council of Regiments that governed the DMC and the world of Dirigent. The Corps was full of cases where more than one member of a family served in the same regiment. Over many generations a set of rules and commonsense traditions had grown to make sure that nepotistic favoritism did not weaken the fabric of the Corps. Every man wearing the uniform had to earn his own way, and being related to a senior officer had at least as many drawbacks as advantages.
“Will you be here for dinner tomorrow …today?” Sara asked.
“One o’clock?” Junior replied. When his mother nodded, he said, “Sure, I’ll be here. Now I’d better get my coat. On busy nights, the cabdrivers start their meters when they honk to announce they’ve arrived.”
“There are times when I think it’s all a conspiracy against the women of Dirigent,” Sara said when the taxi’s tail-lights blinked out as it turned the corner.
“What are you talking about?” Lon asked.
“You finally get to the point where I don’t have to worry about you going out so often and I’ve got to start worrying about Junior off on contract.” Regimental commanders only went off-world on single-battalion contracts under the most extraordinary conditions. If two battalions—half the regiment’s line companies—were involved, the commander might go if it were an especially important contract, or one including considerable ancillary forces; otherwise, his executive officer was more likely to draw the assignment. Only if three battalions or the entire regiment went off-world on a contract was the commander certain to go, and contracts that large were relatively infrequent.
“I tried everything I could to convince him not to enter the Corps,” Lon whispered. There were still moments when he found his mind trying to decide what more he might have done to prevent Junior’s enlistment.
Sara turned away from the picture window at the front of the house and walked toward the Christmas tree. “I know,” she said, so softly that Lon hardly heard. “It was a losing fight from the start. This is Dirigent. The Corps is what we’re all about. We send our men off to war, and sometimes all that comes home is a box and the official regrets of the General.”
Lon went to Sara, stood behind her, and put his hands on her arms, resting his cheek against her hair. “I know it can’t stop the worrying—it doesn’t keep me from worrying about him—but he is good. He’s one of the coolest junior officers in the regiment. He keeps his head in combat and he’s careful, with himself and his men. He’s got good people around him and they take care of him, the way Phip and the others took care of me when I was in the same position.”
“He could have gone into the technical end, become an engineer, and worked in the munitions side of things,” Sara said. “He’s got the brain for it. He’s got the brain to tackle any job he could dream of. No one on Dirigent would have thought the worse for him. The Corps can’t take every boy, and he could have done a lot more good for the world developing better equipment.”
Lon swallowed the sigh that wanted to come out. Nothing about this conversation was new. Alone or together, Lon and Sara had gone through every phrase, every word, uncounted times, spoken or thought.
The romantic holiday mood was gone, and Lon saw little chance of recapturing it that night. When Sara got fixated on this, there was seldom any cure for it but sleep and—sometimes—crying. It was holidays more than anything else that could bring this mood out in her. It didn’t happen often, and it had rarely happened before Junior neared the age when he could enlist. The Corps was so integral to the existence of Dirigent that the need for young men to become soldiers had to be the highest priority, and schooling and social pressure had always been used to impress everyone with that need. Dirigent is the Corps. Without the Corps there would be no Dirigent. The truth of that was unfortunately easy to demonstrate. Without the Corps and its ancillary munitions industry, Dirigent did not have the resources to support 10 percent of its current population at anything beyond the subsistence, everyone-a-farmer, level. It certainly wouldn’t be one of the dozen most prosperous colony worlds.
“You know his argument,” Lon said after a long silence. “He figures he’ll have time to do both, learn firsthand what soldiers face on the ground, then continue his education and find ways to make things better for them. Look on the bright side. He doesn’t plan on spending his entire working career in the Corps. He talks about five or ten years, and if he gets some idea that really catches his imagination, he might cut even that short, anxious to get involved in the research and development end of the business.”
“If he lives long enough,” Sara said. Then she expelled a sigh and turned to face her husband. “I know, I’m making a botch out of the holiday and I shouldn’t.”
“You worry because you care,” Lon said. He knew it was a cliché, but he had learned years before that clichés were the safest way to handle a situation like this. “You wouldn’t be much of a wife and mother if you didn’t worry about us. We might get to thinking that you didn’t love us.”
Sara buried her face against his shirt. To avoid a show of tears, Lon changed the subject. “What time is Angie supposed to be home from that dance?”
“By one-thirty,” Sara said, pulling away from Lon. “The dance ends at one o’clock.” It was a well-supervised affair, chaperoned by teachers from the high school on base that Angie attended and teachers from the three civilian high schools in Dirigent City that also were taking part. “The bus will have the kids back on base by one-twenty, and it shouldn’t take her more than ten minutes to walk home from the bus stop. And, no, I don’t think you should walk over to meet her there. She’ll have friends with her.”
Lon chuckled. “I wasn’t going to suggest that. The only thing I was thinking was that I might stand on the porch and watch.”
“Not even that,” Sara said. “Angie is sixteen years old now, and you know how touchy she is when she thinks we’re still treating her like a little kid.”
“I can’t help it. Where I grew up on Earth it wasn’t safe for a cop to be out alone after dark, let alone a teenager. My hometown had more crime in any given week than the entire world of Dirigent has had in the past quarter century. I still think about that at some level.”
“The kids think you’re making that up, you know, even after they looked up the statistics on the net. Besides, Angle probably won’t be alone. She’s got a new boyfriend, and I imagine he’ll walk her home.”
“New boyfriend? Not that Bobby anymore?”
Sara laughed. “You’re way behind times. There have been two others since Bobby. Three with this latest boy.”
“Who’s she seeing now? Someone from her school?” Lon did not even notice that Sara had come out of her funk.
“His name is Gordon Aruba. His father is a battalion lead sergeant in 10th Regiment.”
Lon closed his eyes for a moment, trying to make a connection to the name. He shook his head. “I don’t think I know him.”
“No, you probably don’t, but Gordon knows who you are, so you can bet he’ll be a perfect gentleman. Now, let’s get back to the music. We don’t want Angie to come home and spot us standing around looking like we’re just waiting for her to check in.”