And three hours later, the siren went off again. Carter brought his head up from between her legs and growled, still starving, like her. He dressed, then ran for his plane. This time, it wasn’t nothing. It was a true target. And now that it was his turn, in the wan, sad hour before dawn, he’d done like Stork, Hardman, and Vaughn had done, like Fenn before them. He killed without any dignity at all.
They cheered him and his flight on the ground, and Carter felt disgusted by it. When he saw Vic, he went to her, but she’d stopped him—laying a hand gently on the frozen leather of his chest.
“No. Celebrate. You need it and so do they.”
“I don’t…”
“Go. I’ll be here when it’s over.”
And she was. There was nowhere else to go.
CARTER’D HAD THIS GIRLFRIEND ONCE, BACK ON EARTH. She was pretty and young and, at the time, so was he.
They’d met in school. He was finishing his third levels in math and physical sciences, prerequisites for the engineering school at Swan that’d already accepted him. She was on an earthbound track, something artistic and soft. Fiber crafts, maybe. Papermaking. It was hard for him to remember now. She’d been a commune kid, born and raised, so the artistic tastes had been no surprise. Her father was a laborer who painted a little—mostly other people’s houses. Her mother did something strange with pottery and was, in that world, quite well-known for it.
Carter was the exact opposite—an engineer born of engineers and raised among engineers just outside Midland Spaceport, he’d never once had cause to question the path that’d been laid out for him since birth. His father designed solar-electric panels, his mother varial-g structural components. Their parents, Carter’s grandparents, had all been engineers. Grandpa Carter had designed light pumps for orbital stations and darkside colonials. Grandma had been heavy into food science. On the other side of the family—his mother’s—the grandparents had both been architectural engineers, one on the public works side, the other in the private sector, though Carter could never recall which had been which and who’d done what.
In any event, they were engineers who made more little engineers (Carter and his two brothers), socialized them only with other little engineers, entertained them with engineers’ toys, and saw them schooled inside primary and secondary academies where engineering was treated almost like a religion, with all the same fervor and promise of great reward. Mark, the oldest, quickly showed a flair for genes, Jacob (ironically) for aeronautics. Kevin Carter, the youngest of the three, was a bit slower, but by sixteen he had found his niche among the mechanical engineers and had flourished. He was happy. He lived a life without doubt, without the stress of wondering what he’d be doing for the rest of his life, because there was never any question of what he’d been born to do. Mark, Jacob, and he had each come out in the top five in their respective first levels, in the top three in their second levels. In turn, they’d each earned off-planet berths—valuable seats on big birds that would take them off to university programs, which would lead to further off-planet postings where they could carry on their life’s work, find girl engineers (or, in Jacob’s case, another boy), make more little engineers and so keep the cycle going. Carter was the last, but he was doing nothing more than following a course already well charted by Mark and Jacob before him.
Then Carter’d met Sara—the girl, the fabric artist or painter or whatever she was. She’d been at the school doing a contract art installation: some mural of glorious engineers doing glorious things like building bridges, DNA helixes, the skeleton frames of spacecraft with classical geometric and physical formulae wreathing their bulk like halos of pure math. It was hideous, but fairly standard—social realism being the only artistic tenet that engineers embraced that couldn’t be expressed as a neat equation or theorem—and Carter had known enough not to blame the artists for the brutish heavy-handedness of the thing. They were artists. They did what they were told or they didn’t eat.
Sara had been there, along with her father and six or seven other apprentices from the commune. And Carter remembered exactly how they’d gotten to talking: She’d spilled a bucket of paint on him. Not exactly subtle. And though she always swore that it’d been accidental, she always swore it with a mocking grin.
It took less than three months for Sara to undo Carter completely, to lift him free from the path of his onrushing future and show him, for lack of a better word, options. One of the reasons he’d been so content in his course was that he’d never known anyone who’d done anything different. He’d never known anyone who wasn’t an engineer or an engineer in training. For the life of him, he couldn’t have understood then why anyone would’ve wanted to be anything but an engineer. He felt proud, fortunate, blessed, even, that he’d been lucky enough to have been born into exactly the right family that could allow him to become exactly what he’d always wanted to be.