So much for the defense of species. Carter didn’t know any vegetarians on Ceti Z. The meat tasted a little like he imagined frog might taste. Or lizard. Dark and oily and rank. It tasted considerably better after smoking a little of the settlers’ product—a strain of cannabis kafiristancia that grew ferociously fast and was shipped in toward the hub in containers packed with thousand-pound bales—but it never tasted good.
He made it back to Sol before his twenty-first birthday and took drop training on Luna, of all places. It was a commercial course for pilots looking to become orbital certified, paid for by NRI through a shell company. Carter adopted the name Tino Vasquez for the duration and spoke as little as possible. It took a week and was the most civil time he’d experienced since leaving Midland. He thought about going AWOL (if that was even the word); of vanishing, finding passage back to Earth, trying to pick up the tatters of his old life. There was a party on the first night for the eleven pilots taking the course—cold beers and real steaks, fiddle music, potato salad, and backslapping. They were staying in a surveyor’s dome—little more than an emergency shelter but compared to what Carter had become accustomed to a palace: fresh, clean oxygen, seals that didn’t leak, beds that were actually beds (not repurposed pallet decking or hammocks woven from fronds), and people who didn’t talk incessantly of the need for armed, violent insurrection against the tyranny of the colonial-industrial complex. Instead, they talked of paychecks and benefits packages, of their children and wives and husbands and families back on Earth or Mars or among the belters; of birthday parties and bad bosses and the weather. Carter missed his family terribly. When someone noticed him crying, he said it was a bad reaction to some antihistamines and went inside to lie down for a while.
They made drops on both the light side and the dark side of Luna, practiced emergency procedures, and sat through classroom lectures in ballistics, physics, and orbital mechanics. They learned how to plot courses and calculate falling trajectories, how to make everything go right, and how to recover when everything went wrong. Then they practiced all of it and then they ate and then they slept and then they started all over again the next day.
At the end of the week, there was another party. Everyone exchanged contact information. Carter’s was all fake, but the sentiments were real. He liked these people. He would miss them. He thought again of escape but knew there was no way. NRI had retained all his real identification. He had no money, no credit. All through the final party, he’d hung close to the center of the celebration, drinking fast and hoping that someone, anyone, would ask him what was wrong. Why he had this look in his eyes like he was drowning a little bit at a time. But no one did. He hadn’t become close enough to any of his classmates to just come out and ask for their help. NRI was his only ride out, his only refuge. And there was still a part of him that was a little curious about what they had in mind for him next.
Re-education. Cold tofu and protein porridge. An iron bunk welded to the bulkhead of a poorly pressurized cargo hold where he and two thousand other quote/unquote volunteers sweated out the wait before their ship could make the translation to Alpha Lyrae. Everyone was sick. Everyone had raging ear infections, bleeding from the sinuses, lung problems, DCS skin rashes, and seizures.
Carter cut his teeth in the Alamora campaign, Lyrae, on a planet called Oizys in eccentric orbit around Vega. A bare twenty-five light-years from Sol, it was a rather close thing—a jungle hell of greens and poison being logged naked by competing resource interests, none of which had any patience for one another or for NRI.
Carter flew—fast-insertion boats full of bewildered volunteers and cadre leaders and commandos and commissars, launched from orbit and falling like shooting stars through the heavy, dense atmosphere. The dropship was one of the favored transports of NRI because it allowed them to unload hundreds of protestors or soldiers or lawyers into anywhere with all the speedy shock and surprise of an orbital bombardment. And this was exactly what Carter did, delivering his human cargoes to programmed coordinates where they were hustled out, down the combat ramps in some semblance of military order, to confront the loggers and their machines with cameras rolling. Under cover of the frenzied, panicked, choking volunteers being herded by the commissars, the commandos would slip away to sabotage machinery and burn fuel dumps. The cadre leaders would take groups of volunteers in riotous charges toward armed loggers or instruct them to chain themselves to trees standing before the onrushing clear-cutting apparatus. Meanwhile, Carter would lift, return to orbit, take on another cargo and some fuel, then do it all again.