A Separate War and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

elevator?”
    â€œI hope it’s temporary. I’ll talk to someone.”
    Sharn found out that it was just a euphoriant in the food; without it, ALSC withdrawal could bring on deep depression. I’d almost rather be depressed, I thought. We were , after all, facing almost certain doom. All but one of us had survived at least one battle in a war where the average survival rate was only 34 percent per battle. If you believed in luck, you might believe we’d used all of ours up.
    We had the satellite to ourselves for eight days—ten officers waited on by a staff of thirty support personnel—while we got our strength back. Of course friendships formed. It was pretty obvious that it went beyond friendship with Chance Nguyen and Aurelio Morales; they stuck like glue from the first day.
    Risa Danyi and Sharn and I made up a logical trio, the three officers out of the chain of command. Risa was the tech officer, a bit older than Sharn and me, with a Ph.D. in systems engineering. She seemed younger, though, born and raised on Heaven. Not actually born, I reminded myself. And never traumatized by combat.
    Risa’s ALSC had been the same as mine, but she had found it more fascinating than terrifying. She was apologetic about that. She had grown up tripping, and was accustomed to the immediacy and drama of it—and she didn’t have any real-life experiences to relate to the dream combat.
    Both Risa and Sharn were bawdy by nature and curious about my heterosex, and while we were silly with the euphoriants I didn’t hold back anything. When I was first in the army, we’d had to obey a rotating “sleeping roster,” so I slept with every male private in the company more than once, and although sleeping together didn’t mean you had to have sex, it was considered unsporting to refuse. And of course men are men; most of them would have to go through the motions, literally, even if they didn’t feel like it.
    Even on board ship, when they got rid of the sleeping roster, there was still a lot of switching around. I was mainly with William, but neither of us was exclusive (which would have been considered odd, in our generation). Nobody was fertile, so there was no chance of accidental pregnancy.
    That notion really threw Sharn and Risa. Pregnancy is something that happens to animals. Sharn had seen pictures of the process, medical history, and described it to us in horrifying detail. I had to remind them that I was born that way—I did that to my mother, and she somehow forgave me.
    Risa primly pointed out that it was actually my father who did it to my mother, which for some reason we all thought was hilarious.
    One morning when we were alone together, just looking down at the planet in the lounge, she brought up the obvious.
    â€œYou haven’t said anything about it, so I guess you’ve never loved a woman.” She cleared her throat, nervous. “I mean had sex. I know you loved your mother.”
    â€œNo.” I didn’t know whether to elaborate. “It wasn’t that common; I mean I knew girls and women who were together. That way.”
    â€œWell.” She patted my elbow. “You know.”
    â€œUh, yes. I mean yes, I understand. Thanks, but I…”
    â€œI just meant, you know, we’re the same rank. It’s even legal.” She laughed nervously; if all the regulations were broken that enthusiastically, we’d be an unruly mob, not an army.
    I wasn’t quite sure what to say. Until she actually asked, I hadn’t thought about the possibility except as an abstraction. “I’m still grieving for William.” She nodded and gave me another pat and left quietly.
    But of course that wasn’t all of it. I could visualize her and Sharn, for instance, having sex; I’d seen it on stage and cube often enough. But I couldn’t put myself in their place. Not the way I could visualize myself being with one of the