DogWalker2
The General's Dog Walker
by bkMarcus
Private Alex Wintergreen sat on a bench outside General Hallek's office, waiting to meet the man who would be his boss for the next 3 years. He shifted in his seat. He closed his eyes. He felt a headache coming on.
The bench was inflatable, as was most of the furniture in the outer office. Since arriving on the planet, Wintergreen had seen inflatable furniture, inflatable tools and utilities, inflatable everything. While NATO was willing to spend trillions of dollars lifting heavy weaponry and components out of one gravity well and soft-landing it here in another, they were very conscious of conserving cost and storage on anything related to human comfort.
Wintergreen had arrived 12 hours earlier and had already decided that Mars was the worst place he'd ever been in his almost-18 years – and Wintergreen was of the opinion that he'd been in the worst places North America had to offer. His dad had been military, and Wintergreen and his mom had followed him from station to station -- at least 2 or 3 each year -- until his mom died in the middle of the night, in his parents bedroom, while his father was on duty elsewhere. After that, his father's assignments grew less brief, and Wintergreen was able to spend as much as 18 months in one place for a stretch, but mom was gone and dad hardly ever saw him.
Sergeant William Robert Wintergreen had tried to get his sister to take Alex off his hands, but Aunt Berte said she didn't want to raise no boys, specially no teenage boys, which is what Alex would be in less than a year, so he followed his father for the next 5 years, until he managed to enlist on his 17th birthday. Since Alex was still a minor, he had to forge his father's signature on the enlistment forms, but he knew that Sergeant Wintergreen wouldn't mind – and if he ever saw the forms, he might have sworn the forgery was his own signature. Alex had had years of practice.
The 18-month stay was at Fort North, in New Jersey, which Tony Martin, a local boy who befriended him the first day of school, told him was the armpit of America. Wintergreen said that if New Jersey was America's armpit, then he'd already become familiar with its nostrils, toe jamb, asshole and lower intestine. He preferred New Jersey to what he'd seen of Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, West Virginia, Alaska and Utah. In New Jersey, he and Tony could cut class and spend the day in New York City, which had maintained its grit, its glitz and its attitude, despite the influx of politicians and parasites that had resulted when the city became the new capital of North America 25 years earlier.
Mars felt like an Alaskan winter night under a North Jersey sky – with an Appalachian infrastructure buried under layers of West Virginia's dust. Though Martian dust was the color of rust, not coal.
Small, busy robots cleaned the corridors constantly, but someone had plenty of time to scrawl graffiti in the soot and grime on every surface:
Kilroy was here!
Better Off Red!
U.S. Out Of North America!
Valis Lives!
There was no dust in the outer office of General Hallek, nor any sign of the autopilot dustbusters Wintergreen had seen everywhere else since his planet fall. He wondered if it would be his job to keep the place clean. Across the room from the inflatable bench were a gray plastic desk and an inflatable chair. Normally, in a waiting room like the one he found himself in, there would be an assistant or receptionist avoiding eye contact while he sat here, but Wintergreen himself was to be Hallek's new personal assistant, and so the desk sat empty until he met the General.
Wintergreen thought he could hear the General's voice through the door. The man sounded like he was talking to an infant. Hallek was well known on Earth: the leader of NATO's forces in the Martian conflict. He was a fit, silver-haired man who smiled readily for the cameras, though he never looked comfortable doing so. In Wintergreen's brief experience, smiling officers were not to be trusted. Neither were most of the grim-faced ones, but with them, you got what they offered. He wondered whether Hallek would be a smiler away from the cameras.
Wintergreen uncrossed and recrossed his legs. By closing his lids, and breathing evenly, he could reduce the ache behind his eyes, but despite the reduced gravity and the air cushion beneath him, his body was beginning to complain from sitting still so long. He wanted to stretch, but knew better than to do so. He didn't dare pace, fearing the General would catch him at it and infer his impatience. Neither did he want to be caught fidgeting.
Wintergreen had screwed up or failed out of every chance the military had given him so far and he knew that there were, in fact, worse places than Mars that the Army could send him. Tony Martin had told him his older brother had been a pilot before the Martian conflict started, that he had crashed his ship into the desert, and that now his brain was wired into one of those deep-system ships that herded the giant ice from Saturn's rings down into the southern hemisphere of Mars.
"Frank's doing some of the most important work there is for terraforming, but he never gets to leave the ship. I mean, you know, he practically is the ship. There're a couple of European skin jobs in his crew, arms and legs to do the work inside the ship, but even they get to make planet fall once a year. The closest Frank will ever come to that is when the ship needs repairs. It's really kinda gross."
Despite Tony's upset over Frank Martin's condition, he himself enlisted a week after learning that Wintergreen had done so. Frank and Tony had been raised by their grandparents, a loud Italian couple who agreed only on issues of Catholicism and patriotism. Tony's grandfather always brought up his service in Vietnam, which according to Wintergreen's history program was an early Cold War conflict that JFK had withdrawn the US from in his second term. The elder Martin supported the space program, unquestioningly, but he'd shake his head when talking about its early days, saying, "Jack Kennedy shoulda let us won."
Tony didn't need to forge his grandfather's signature on his enlistment forms: the man was proud that his oldest grandson was literally the brains of a deep system military ship, and hoped Tony would manage to do as well for himself.
Wintergreen asked his father to come to Tony's funeral after the training accident. He didn't expect him to show up, but he did.
At the reception after the funeral, Wintergreen introduced his father to the Martins. Tony's grandmother put her palm against Wintergreen's cheek and said "You look strong, Alex. Not so skinny anymore." Wintergreen didn't know what to say. She looked at his father and asked if he was proud of him, but before the Sergeant could answer she turned back to the younger Wintergreen and asked "Was Tony getting strong, too?"
"Yes, ma'am. He was getting very strong. Fast and accurate. The training was --" Suddenly Wintergreen flushed. He didn't want to say too much about the training that had killed Tony Martin. He felt that the word "training" itself was somehow in poor taste in this particular setting. "He was doing very well, ma'am."
She smiled at him, weakly, and Wintergreen's father led him away before he could say anything else.
Standing together in the far corner of the Martin family's back yard, the two Wintergreen men said nothing. They were the only uniformed people at the reception. Alex was thinking that this was the most time he'd spent with his father in several years. He wanted to thank him for coming, but didn't feel comfortable breaking the silence.
Sergeant Wintergreens sighed, and said, "You know, Alex, there've always been training accidents in the military. We don't talk about it much. Recruits should know that the army is a dangerous place, long before you get out in the field." Again, Alex didn't know what to say. His father said, "No one ever told you boys it was safe or easy, but what they're doing to you now isn't right. There are too many accidents. That stuff is too new. They've barely tested it on monkeys!"
Alex Wintergreen didn't want to contradict his father, but he felt like defending the training program. He had overheard his father complaining about the drugs and the brain shunts, the direct programming of the soldier's nervous system, but he'd always considered his complaints the kind of thing an old guy just said, a back-in-my-day sort of stance that older people were always taking.
"It's the best way to prepare us, sir ... for ..."
"Look, boy, don't quote me the Army's welcome speech. You don't think I get enough of that as it is?"
"Sir, I --"
"It's not too late to pull out, Alex. I can call in some favors, have you transferred to a different program --"
"No!" Alex realized he'd barked the word, and the closest guests were trying not to look at him. "Don't do anything!" he whispered harshly. "I want to be a soldier. A real --"
"Ok, son. I'm sorry I mentioned it."
They stood again in silence, while the reception wound down. His father put a hand on his shoulder. "I understand how you feel, son." He shook his son's hand and said, "I gotta get going. I'll see you around." And he walked across the yard, around the house, and out of sight.
Wintergreen hadn't seen his father since. A month after the funeral, he was dismissed from the training program. They told him it was because he'd developed resistances, was having trouble focusing and that his body might be rejecting the process. He had been feeling off stride since Tony's accident, but a part of him felt sure his father had called in some of those favors.
The two Wintergreens rarely spoke, but now Alex actively avoided communicating with his father. He didn't want to have to ask if he'd interfered, and he didn't want to hear his father's answer either way. If he denied it, he'd probably suspect he was lying, so why deal with it?
Military Intelligence recruited him for office training. To spite his father, he volunteered for an experimental program of drugs and hypnosis. They refused to let him do a direct brain shunt after his dismissal from soldier's training, but they supplemented the experimental program with older virtuality programming instead. Despite the lack of wires running in and out of his skull, training for office work felt more similar to soldier school than different.
When he started developing headaches, he took painkillers and didn't mention it to anyone. When the medics told him he was over his quota for the pills, he found an illegal supplier among the other trainees and continued his work.
A week before graduation, his supplier was caught and brought before a court martial. He gave up a list of his customers and two MPs arrested Wintergreen. Since Wintergreen was the least serious of the buyers -- he only bought painkillers, which were not themselves against either the law or regulations -- he was failed out of intelligence school, but allowed to remain in the Army.
Mars was a last chance. He would take full advantage of all the standard drugs, but he couldn't let himself step over the line. The offworld corps was suspicious of him, but volunteers were hard to come by, and he did have both combat training and clerical training, even if he hadn't finished either one. They gave him the usual speeches and warnings about the lack of distraction offworld: no commercial audio, no commercial video, no commercial web at all, no clubs, no discos, no parties. You could pick up broadcast transmissions from Earth, but most North Americans didn't know what to do with 2-D, noninteractive entertainment. Wintergreen knew that there were, in fact, underground clubs and parties, an active traffic in non-regulation drugs, and that the MPs turned a blind eye to the "working girls" -- European gynoids, recalled and retrained for combat, who were officially up here as soldiers, but continued to turn tricks in their spare time. Wherever there were long-term soldiers, there would be plenty of ways to get in trouble, but Wintergreen was determined to keep his nose clean. The only thing worse than being a desk jockey on Mars would be to land in lock-up on Mars.
The Generals door handle turned and Wintergreen jumped to his feet and waited at attention. "Private Wintergreen, reporting for duty, sir!"
General Hallek stood before Wintergreen, looking bemused. "Well, welcome, Private Wintergreen. What are you doing over here by my door?"
"Sir, I'm your new assistant, sir!"
"At ease, private. I know you're anxious to please, but we run things pretty relaxed up here."
"Yes, sir. Thank you, sir." Wintergreen stood akimbo, with his hands clasped behind his back.
"No, son. Not that kind of at-ease: I mean put yourself at ease. Take it easy."
"Uh, yes ... sir." Wintergreen didn't know what to do with his body and settled for slouching in place. At this point he noticed that the General was holding a leash. At the other end of the leash, was a small dog.
"I know you're my new assistant, Wintergreen. I do read the transmissions they send me. But why aren't you at your desk?"
"Uhhhm..."
"Well, never mind. This is Bonaparte, Private Wintergreen. The General's official dog. Gift from the Soviets. Bonaparte, say hello to Private Wintergreen."
"Hello, Private Wintergreen," said the dog.
"What the--?"
"Ha!" the General laughed. "Gotcha!"
"Sir?"
"I love watching people's reaction to that!"
"Oh, I see, sir. You ... threw your voice?" Wintergreen immediately regretted having offered a guess.
"No, no, no. The dog said hello to you. Watch." General Hallek got down on one knee and looked the dog in the eyes. "What do you think of Private Wintergreen, Bonaparte?"
"Nice man," said the dog. "Looks nice."
"Yeah, the Russians gave me Bonaparte last year, before all the shooting started. I don't know if they were showing off their technology -- sort of an implicit threat -- or if he was a genuine peace offering, but either way, the General's dog is a talking dog. Right, Bone?"
"Right, General." The dog looked at the door. "Time for my walk, General."
"Right, time for your walk. Wintergreen, would you mind taking Bonaparte to the central gardens? He loves it there, and I'm afraid I don't have time right now."
"Certainly, sir." Wintergreen accepted the leash. "But sir? I don't understand. Does he really need to, um, go for a walk?"
"I don't follow your meaning, son."
"I mean, will he be just walking, sir, or ... I mean. Is he a machine, sir? Or...?"
"Oh, good Lord no. Intel looked him over thoroughly. He's a dog. Has a few chips in his head, but he's a dog. They cleared him. Now Bonaparte is being very patient with us. I'm afraid he's needed his walk for about half an hour now, and I kept putting him off. Take him out for about an hour, and I'll talk to you when you bring him back."
"Yes, sir."
Wintergreen led the small dog to the outer door. Negotiating the leash and the creature in low G was awkward.
"Private?"
Wintergreen stopped before closing the door behind them. "Yes sir?"
"You don't have to wait for me to invite you in, next time. Just knock. I won't bite."
"Me neither," said the dog.
"Yes, sir." Wintergreen's headache was getting worse. "Thank you, sir."
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