Terms of Enlistment 01.2: Measures of Absolution Read Online Free PDF Page A

rehab.”
    “We’re on light duty,” Priest says and gets out of his chair. “Top says we’re off the line until the squad gets a debriefing and a psych eval.”
    Of course, Jackson thinks. They’re not going to let us anywhere near a loaded gun until the shrinks and the Intelligence officers have cleared us.
    “Top said you were on leave for the week,” Baker says.
    “I was,” she says. “Cut it short. Ain’t shit to do out there.”
    “So what do we do now?”
    Jackson opens her locker and takes out her knife and a sharpening stone. Then she walks over to the table and sits down in the chair Priest just vacated.
    “We get the edge back on,” she says. “Downtime ain’t gonna last forever.”
     
    She gets her medical clearance the next morning. One of the resident TA MedCorps docs looks Jackson over, checks the medical data from her armor, and pronounces her physically fit for unrestricted duty, as if she couldn’t have determined that by herself. The psych eval and Intel debriefing are equally superficial and cursory, standard “how does that make you feel?” psychobabble bullshit, some half-trained shrink checking off boxes on a form. She gives him the answers she knows will let him make his marks in the right spots.
    The Intel debriefing doesn’t even have any sort of point. Her helmet camera captured everything much more reliably than her memory did.
    “Forty-three,” the battalion’s intel officer tells her at the debriefing.
    “Excuse me, sir?”
    “Forty-three kills,” he says. “Your tally for Detroit. All good kills on armed hostiles. You did well.”
    Is that supposed to make her feel better, give her pride or a sense of accomplishment? Lighten her conscience, maybe? If anything, it has the opposite effect. Those were not soldiers of a foreign army. They were welfare rats, with no armor and mostly antique weapons. They may have come out on top because it was a thousand of them against four squads, but they paid dearly for their victory if the rest of the company had kill counts anything like Jackson’s. Next time the TA goes in, there’ll be more of them and they’ll be much more determined, because now they know they can win. They almost got a drop ship with a full armory and loaded ordnance racks. Jackson has no doubt they’ll try again. She would.
    No, there’s no way to look at this as anything but a disaster. Going back to that place will never be the same. It might as well be a different country now.
    Jackson knows that telling the Intel officer these things wouldn’t make a difference. It’s like all the staff officers live in a different reality, one with its own language and customs and laws of physics. What the fuck does it matter that she killed forty-three of those shit-eating, savage sewer rats? There are millions more.
     
    Exactly a week after Detroit, the company commander summons Jackson into his office.
    “You’re the ranking member of your squad at the moment,” Captain Lopez says to her when she takes the chair he offers.
    “Yes, sir,” she replies. “Sergeant Fallon isn’t back from Great Lakes yet.”
    “And she won’t be, not for a while. Anyway, I have orders to send people to the funerals. I’m sending Lieutenant Weaving to PFC Paterson’s funeral. I’ll be attending Private Stratton’s. I want you to accompany me as the representative from his squad. Send one of the other privates with the Lieutenant. Your pick.”
    “Yes, sir,” she says. The military has probably already reclaimed all the money in Stratton and Paterson’s accounts. Their families won’t see a penny of the money they earned while in uniform. If you die before the end of your term, it all goes back to the government. Not that it’s ever more than a number in a database somewhere. So why would they even go to the expense of sending funeral delegations? It makes no sense to Jackson. But she’s just a corporal and Captain Lopez is the company commander, so she salutes and