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knew, a part of him he never shared with any of
us…not until I was getting ready to leave for my deployment. He
just sprung it on me the day before I shipped out. I was stunned at
first. I almost got mad that he’d hidden it for so long, but I
caught my anger. I didn’t want to spend the last few hours I’d ever
see my father arguing over nonsense that didn’t matter.
    He said it was something he hated to
talk about, didn’t even like to remember. There wasn’t time to get
into a lot of detail, but it was obvious he still had some open
wounds from his experiences. He’d served in the old U.S. Navy,
before the Consolidation. He fought in the Mideast War and the
Taiwan Intervention, he told me. I’d heard of both conflicts, but
only vaguely. They were both quarantined topics. Talking about them
wasn’t safe, and there was nowhere to get any information anyway.
Nothing beyond vague rumors. Certainly nothing worth risking a trip
to a reeducation facility.
    Never trust the government, he told
me…the bureaucrats who moved the pieces around the board. Keep my
eyes open. All the time. Think for myself, and don’t believe
anything I’m told. “Medals, causes, speeches,” he said, “They are
all worthless. They are as corrupt as the puppet masters who use
them to control men.” Finally, he looked at me with sad watery eyes
and said, “Jake…don’t you ever depend on anyone except those guys
standing next to you when the shooting starts. They are your
brothers…and they are the only ones you can trust.”
    I understood. Everyone chafed under
the regulations, the constant monitoring. We were all a little
afraid. Most people knew someone who’d been sent for reeducation.
Or knew someone who knew someone. But it was normal to fear the
government, just as a child fears upsetting a parent. The average
person didn’t comprehend, couldn’t see the whole picture the way
the Admins did. I understood better than my father. My education
had been more modern than his…I’d had the chance to study how
difficult it was for the common citizen to grasp the complexities
of governing a chaotic world. The importance of controlling
damaging speech and limiting freedoms that would only be abused to
the detriment of all. My father didn’t understand any of that…he
just lashed out at UN Central, blaming the government for all the
world’s problems.
    UN Central was far from perfect, but
they’d absorbed the failing nation-states and defended us against
the Tegeri and the Machines for 30 years. In all that time there’d
been no war on Earth, no nations left to wage it. All mankind’s
potential, for so long squandered in internecine strife, was
focused to one purpose. To my father’s thinking, we’d lost our way,
our freedom. No one could convince him otherwise, and I’d long
since tired of trying.
    He was emotional, struggling to get
out the words he wanted to say. That was a hard day for both of us,
for obvious reasons. I knew my father. I’d heard his rants before.
He hated UN Central, despised what government had become. But that
day was different. There was a rawness to what he said, a
passionate urgency I didn’t pick up on back then. There was too
much else on my mind…and so many of the things I would see and
learn were still ahead of me. I listened to all he said, feeling
strangely that there had been so much about my own father I’d never
known. But I discounted most of his advice, wrote it off to an old
man’s political rants.
    That was a mistake.
     
    “I’m afraid Sergeant Lin has been killed in
action on Asgard.” Gregor Kazan sat, looking uncomfortable despite
the considerable plushness of the leather chair. Kazan had an odd
demeanor to him, both physically and in the way he spoke. When he
was younger, it had been called many things, variations on “creepy”
being the most common. As he rose through the UN bureaucracy and
his power grew, those types of comments became less and less
frequent. Now that