At Least Until Tomorrow

I stood at the door for what seemed like hours. I desperately wanted to go inside and see her, but another part of me filled with dread at the thought of it.

I’d spent the last seven months going through fleet marine training and you would think that fear was something they trained out of you.

It was not.

They simply trained you how to push through it. They treated fear as if it was some sort of liquid barrier…you only had to push hard enough against it, and you would come out the other side.

I sighed, turned the knob, and walked in.

I stood there for a moment longer than necessary and let myself feel the peace and calm of the house. The home. Our home.

She was in the kitchen putting the final touches on the evening meal.

“Hey” she said. “Glad you’re home.”

She said that more than she’d ever done before. It was as if she thought saying it enough could make up for the times it hadn’t been said. For me, it did.

Sooner or later, I was going to be deployed to the Seven Sisters. We both knew it would be much sooner than either of us wanted and the silence of the dread hung heavily between us.

“Hey yourself,” I replied.

“I am going to miss you so much,” almost made it out before I choked it back down. Pointing it out didn’t really help.

Like so many millions of others I’d volunteered for Earth’s service. I would be hastily trained, issued kit and weaponry not up to the job, and deployed to the Pleiades Cluster to fight a species that was our physical superior in every way. We would be the last line of defense between there and here.

Rumor was we were one more lost battle from the war moving to Earth.

“Let me set the table,” I offered.

“Sure,” came her reply. She never even turned to look at me, but I could see fear in the subtle tremor of her shoulders.

I grabbed the plates out of the cupboard and placed two on the small table in the 50 square meter apartment we were upgraded to after I completed initial training.

Something in her softened and a tension left the room.It was as if she had decided to make peace with her anxiety, at least for tonight. Or perhaps she just surrendered to it.

We mostly ate in silence. The meal was only occasionally interrupted by small bits of conversation that attempted to sprout into something more meaningful but just couldn’t find the soil to grow.

After the last bite I stood and reached for a plate to start doing the dishes. It was the least I could do.

She reached across the table and put her hand on mine as I was picking up her plate and gently squeezed. Her eyes held mine with something that spoke of love mixed with resignation

“Not tonight,” she said through a thin smile.

She stood, my hand still held by hers, and pulled me toward the bedroom.

The next morning, I awoke to the sun on my face. Our little apartment had a real window.Getting a place with one was just luck, but with all the shortages due to the war effort, every little comfort was a blessing.

She was already in the kitchen.

I walked in as she was putting away the last of the dishes from dinner.

“Good morning,” came with a smile that felt genuine, and warm. It reminded me of how much I loved her and how blessed I’d felt when she agreed to marry me.

She’d had so many other options — many of them better in my estimation. Apparently, none had been better in hers.

Every day I woke up with her amazed me.

“I should probably shower and report in,” I said.

“Yeah,” was all that came back.

“I could call in sick today,” I offered.

Her countenance shifted visibly.

“Don’t you dare,” she said in a staccato clip that was full of passion, and angst at what could happen if command chose to come and check and I wasn’t actually ill.

“On top of everything else, we don’t need you demoted to support labor,” she offered up. The fear of being sent into a combat area as an unarmed pack mule was something everyone lived with. At least if you qualified for military service you could live on the pay, and you had insurance if something… happened.

Support labor was usually staffed by criminals or dishonorably discharged military who had not finished their ten-year term.

“Okay, sure,” I whispered.

We’d connected last night and I didn’t want that to pass. Sometimes when we were in each other’s arms, we could pretend it was still a time before the war and all the changes it brought. A time when we might have lived simple but happy lives as workers, or farmers, or whatever we qualified to do. Maybe even trade school could have been an option.

I showered and put on my uniform.

Some people like uniforms. Mine didn’t have much in the way of military about it. I had no rank, no medals, just a unit patch. It looked like someone’s regular clothes that had been chosen so all the parts matched colors.

She walked me to the door, and we stood there for an eternity. When I looked into her eyes my world felt whole. I couldn’t say what words described how she felt, but her eyes invited me into her soul.

“I love you,” were the only words that came to me.

After a long moment she looked away as her eyes filled with water. She tilted her head, stood on her toes and softly brushed her lips across mine.

“At least until tomorrow,” she said. “Goodbye,” escaped her as she closed the door.

I could hear her crying through it.

It took fifteen minutes of walking, thirty minutes on the public train, and finally another ten minutes on a bus to make it to the base.

The guards at the gate did everything but cut a sample of tissue from me to check my DNA and confirm I was human, actually a marine, and supposed to be where I was.

I don’t think they were as much concerned about actual security as I think they were concerned with keeping boredom at bay.

They treated every soldier the same level of awful.Except officers. You did not annoy officers. They were allowed to shoot you if maintaining discipline required it. Even bored bullies were not that stupid.

I still had 15 minutes until formation, so I wandered into the area of the barracks we called a Day Room. I’m not actually sure why it was called that because almost nobody would be there during the day.It was for single soldiers who lived in the building to have a place to gather in the evenings. Regardless, there was a pot of what passed for coffee, and it was free.

Eventually, the time came for us to gather in our ranks and find out what we would be doing today. We all already knew, but this was the military and last night’s orders very often did not survive today’s morning light. All of us dreaded what was coming.

We stood at attention as the Senior Sergeant took role.Everyone was present and accounted for.

Next came the unit commander. He said a few words about the day’s activities and then he did something I’d never seen an officer do before.

He just stopped talking for a moment, then something in him shifted. Somehow, he seemed a little less military and a little more human.

He slowly looked at us, eyes settling on each man or woman for just a second. Then he spoke.

“Troops,” he started. “You all know you have volunteered to become Fleet Marine Raiders. That means you will be deployed beyond our lines in missions to harass the enemy, kill them, and destroy their means to make war on us. This enemy is biologically more capable than humans are, so without the physical enhancements you will receive today, you will not survive contact with this enemy. More importantly, without your ability to fight them as peers, Earth will not survive either. Thank you for volunteering to do this. I hope by doing so you will keep them away from everything you love…and everyone.”

He let go of a heavy sigh and simply turned his back and walked away.

As a group we marched in formation to the medical center. We stood in long lines for our turn in the treatment chambers.

Initial physical enhancement only took a few minutes. Tiny machines the sergeants called “Nano Tech” were injected into us. A very small percentage of us would die because our bodies could not adapt, but the rest of us would begin to grow stronger, faster, and smarter.

We would not be immortal or anything like that, but we would be physically stronger, mentally sharper, and capable of hand-to-hand combat with the enemy.

Like everything else in the Universe, good things often came with bad tradeoffs.

After our injections we marched back to a special barracks that had been emptied for us. As the physical changes began to manifest, we would need supervision by medical staff, and we would need to eat close to twenty thousand calories per day in order for our bodies to provide enough fuel for the little machines to make their changes.

The Marine Raider Regiment Table of Equipment called for three thousand marines. Three battalions of one thousand each. We had forty-five hundred this morning. In six weeks, after the failures happened, we would have almost three thousand exactly.

I survived.

Some of my friends I’d trained with did not.

In a year, there might be five hundred of us still alive.

The odds of surviving a ten-year enlistment were one in a thousand. You would think Raiders had a higher survival rate due to their upgrades, but the missions they get sent on more than even the odds, especially over longer periods of time. In reality, Raiders never survived intact.

If you somehow managed to make it through your first five years, you could volunteer for officer training, but that would cost you an additional decade in uniform. Officers were in for twenty, and their survival rate wasn’t much better.

The day finally came when we were medically cleared to begin training again.

Up at 3:30 AM, exercise, a meal, weapons training all morning, combat exercises until late afternoon, another meal, then night training until midnight.

Our new bodies were fully up to doing all of that on three hours sleep. I didn’t really feel the physical toll they were trying to place on my body. In fact, I didn’t feel much of anything. Neither did my body.

Another month of that and it was time to begin preparing for deployment.

We spent days preparing gear. We would clean it, pack it, load it on platforms, and then send it up the space elevator to the station, where it would be loaded onto the cargo ships the fleet would send with us when we were ready to ship out.

I once again found myself standing in formation in front of our commander. He told us that our unit now had an official designation and that the word training had been removed from the unit’s name.

He also told us that we were marine raiders now, and that we could refer to ourselves as such. We were the elite of the Terran Fleet Marines, and we were just as good as any special forces in any other branch of the military. Except for the army and navy. He told us we were better than them.

He also said that tomorrow we would have one more chance to see our families, who had been ordered to come to the departure station and say farewell to us.

That day came and we marched with all of our gear for a couple of miles to the place where we would board either shuttles or space elevator cars for the trip up to our ships.

We were marched into a large complex that looked like it had originally been built to play some sort of sport in.

Our families were seated in the spectator seats, and we were held in formation for at least five minutes. This organized the chaos a little and allowed the families to look over the lines of troops and spot their marine. When we were dismissed, it made it easier for everyone to find each other in such a large crowd.

It took less than a minute to see her walking toward me. Her gait was stiff and mechanical, like she was walking toward someplace she did not want to go.

She stopped in front of me and softly smiled at me. This time her eyes and her smile were equal measures of sadness.

“I am glad you are alive,” she said. I thought she probably meant it, but I wasn’t sure.

“I hope you are well,” I replied, still standing at a position close to attention.

“Do try to make it back,” she mumbled as she reached out and placed her hand against my elbow.

“If I can,” was what I said.

She sighed, turned around and walked away.

Our encounter was repeated three thousand times that day. Sometimes with wives, sometimes husbands, parents, whatever.

There is a cost to that physical enhancement program.It makes your body strong and your mind quick, but it does it at the expense of your ability to feel emotions.

The day we became Raiders is the day we died to our families. We were already casualties before we loaded onto the first ship.

Tradeoffs are not always fair, and we had traded who we were for a small chance to save their lives.