"I wanted to serve too," Zogan said. "I was in the MPG fifteen years ago, back in the early days, but got out after only five years. I tried to re-enlist after the declaration of independence but they told me that since I was forty-five and not in the best shape that I'd probably serve Mars better by staying on the streets and being a cop."
"You ain't gotta explain yourself to me," Jeff said. "Someone needs to arrest the fuckin' profiteers, don't they?"
"Indeed they do," he agreed. "And we caught ourselves a prime one tonight, didn't we?"
"Yep," Jeff said. "So how long will she stay in jail? Will she do hard time?"
Zogan shook his head sadly. "Governor Whiting is promising radical law enforcement and justice system reform when we get around to writing a new constitution but for now we're still operating under the old system. Even though the laws against hoarding and profiteering are new ones and they wrote in stiff penalties, it's simply not possible to hold anyone for something like that with the system we have. She'll be out on her own recognizance in twenty-four hours and it'll be months before her case comes to trial. It goes without saying that she won't show up for her court date and there aren't enough cops on the streets yet to go tracking down every failure to appear warrant. She'll probably be back doing business within two days, although we'll make an effort to keep an eye on her."
"That's a fuckin' retreat," Jeff said.
"That ain't no shit," the cop agreed. "If you're serious about divorcing that bitch you'd better file tomorrow before she gets out. Ask for an emergency financial settlement from the clerk. He'll clear it with a judge on duty and divide up your accounts into halves. That'll keep her from spending all your money."
"Most of that money in there is from her selling this shit," Jeff said. "I don't want anything to do with that. I just want the credits in the account. I earned those motherfuckers and I don't want her slimy hands touching none of them."
Zogan smiled respectfully. "Tell that to the clerk," he said. "If he's got Martian blood in his veins he'll arrange that for you, especially if he knows you're a combat vet from the Gap."
"I'll do that," Jeff said.
"Of course, you'll still have a hell of a time getting your half of the belongings from this apartment. You'll have to wait until the divorce is actually final for that."
Jeff shrugged. "She can have everything in this fuckin' place," he said. "I don't want none of it."
"Yeah?" Zogan asked slyly. "How about the contraband?"
"Huh?"
"Well, let me clear this with my sergeant, who will probably have to clear it with the lieutenant, but when we catch a hoarder all we have to do is verify the contents of a few containers for the court case and then get a photo of the amount. The actual shit ends up being shipped to a city warehouse where it's taken into custody by the interim government and re-distributed as they see fit. Most of it ends up going to MPG units."
"That must be where they got the beer they gave us tonight," Jeff said.
"Exactly. So how about we just skip the middle man tonight and send the shit directly where it's needed? Are the combat units having a party somewhere tonight?"
"The Troop Club just outside the base," Jeff said. "But..."
"Like I said," Zogan told him. "Let me clear it with the higher ups, but I don't see any reason why we can't get a delivery truck over here and a few cops to act as muscle and carry all this shit downstairs and take it to the Troop Club. You guys deserve it."
"Well fuck my ass," Jeff said in wonder.
The Troop Club did indeed have some beer and smokes for the combat troops, but not enough to satisfy the thirst and nicotine cravings of all who entered its doors. The contributions from Belinda and from the supplies of three other hoarder/profiteers who were busted that night throughout Eden added enough party supplies to guarantee everyone a good time.
Jeff stayed until well after midnight. He drank two bottles of Fruity and six bottles of beer. He smoked four bonghits of potent Agricorp greenbud and more than a pack of cigarettes. He forgot all about Belinda his wife and Belinda his competition for Xenia. He forgot all about the death he had witnessed out in the field, the fear, the horror, the misery, the blinding fatigue and weariness. He listened to music and even tried his hand at dancing when one of the women invited him out onto the floor.
Alas, the male to female ratio was somewhere in the vicinity of six to one, even with the waitresses and bartenders thrown in. Though he was a combat veteran and worthy of the attention of any single female, so was every other male in the place since only those who had been out on the line were allowed into the club on this night. The only offer of sexual congress extended to him was from Xenia, who found him around 2300 when he was working on his last Fruity and his last bonghit.
She was, if anything, even more intoxicated than he. "How's the resolve?" she asked him, looking at him greedily.
"It's been hit with eighties, sixties, and twenties and has crumbled considerably," he replied, getting an erection just looking at her.
"Really?" she asked, reaching out to stroke his arm.
He sighed. "But its still holding," he said. "You won't take it down."
She pouted and said, "we'll see."
They saw. Just over an hour later they left the club and rode the MarsTrans to her apartment. His resolve was protected by the fact that he passed out on her couch before she had a chance to make her move. She cursed a few times in frustration and then sat in the recliner next to him to plot her next move. While she was doing so she passed out as well.
Lon, Lisa, and the rest of the special forces squad spent the bulk of the next day right back on the hills they'd first climbed during the first day of the WestHem landings. For more than eight hours they watched the final loading of the remaining APCs and tanks and artillery pieces and anti-air vehicles. They watched engineers and MPs and other troops walking around in the open, facilitating the process of all this loading. They watched thousands of combat troops — the battered survivors of the bloody campaign — sitting in groups of ten and twenty, prime targets for mortar attack or for sniper attack. But there were no mortars to call down, no snipers to send their lethal bullets flying. There was only Lon and his team on this hill, a few other teams on a few other hills, and their mission was to observe only.
"Well, we observed the shit out of them, didn't we?" Lon asked angrily as the last soldier entered the last landing craft and the last door was sealed shut. The landscape was now empty of all human activity.
"Orders are orders, Lon," Lisa told him, her M-24 curled unfired against her shoulder, her anti-tank laser sitting next to her. "I'm sure General Jackson has a reason for calling a cease-fire."
"I'm sure he does too," Lon said. "I just think it's a stupid reason. You'd think a military genius would know that you never let up on an enemy until they surrender. Those assholes didn't surrender. They're just pulling back to regroup. We could have knocked off another couple thousand of them on their march back. We could have knocked out another hundred APCs. Now we're going to face all that armor again in a couple of weeks."
"Unless we decide not to come back out here," said Horishito, who was nearly as bitter about Jackson's decision as Lon was.
Lisa looked over at him in alarm. "What the fuck are you talking about, Hoary?" she asked him. "You ain't thinking about quitting, are you?"
Horishito shrugged. "I did my part out here," he said. "I hear that a lot of the combat troops are calling it a war now that we've been hamstrung in how we fight it."
This was indeed a prevalent rumor back at the base. The word was the many of the ACR troops and the special forces soldiers — those who had borne the brunt of the recent battles, who had seen the deaths and mayhem that war caused firsthand — had decided they had risked their lives quite enough in this endeavor, that they had done their part. Since there was no such thing as a period of enlistment in the MPG they were free to quit at any time. And, since most of them had been pulled off the line in response to the recent pullback of WestHem troops, the word was that many were taking that option, especially in light of General Jackson's increasingly unpopular cease-fire order.