Chapter 3: Tom Jenkins

Tom Jenkins pulled dandelions on his lawn. It was a rite of spring. The sun beat on his shoulders as he bent, pushed in the rooting tool and levered it just so until he heard the snap of the deep root, then he pulled up the clump of the plant and tossed it into the bucket and moved on to the next one. He wondered for the millionth time why, of all the earth-life the founders had brought to this world, someone had thought to include dandelions.

"Fucken dandelions!" he muttered to himself as he dug out a particularly stubborn clump.

He'd come full circle from when he was a kid picking dandelions in his father's yard in Ohio more years ago then he cared to count in real-time, and nearly 70 years as he counted his own. He'd been a dumb kid with bad grades and no prospects and a bad tendency to get himself into all kinds of trouble. He joined the Fleet to keep trouble away. That was long, long ago in the early days of the great alien war, over 800 years as calendars counted time on the surface of a world, but as he'd come to learn, time was a stretchable, strange thing when you skated between the stars in ships.

He'd learned that hard lesson twice in the span of his life. The first time was when his first four-year hitch was up. They'd had four-year hitches when he had joined, but that changed as time and the war dragged on, and in his later years no one believed him when he told them he had signed up for a four-year "tour of duty" as they had called it then. By then no matter how you got into the Fleet, whether by draft or enlistment, it was for life.

But that first time, when he'd come home after serving four years, over 60 years had flown by at home. "Time dilation" the Fleet counselors had explained to him. He didn't understand it and all he knew for sure was that everyone he had known in his youth, both family and friends, had died or moved on, and the whole world had changed and moved on with them. So, he signed back up and went back to war.

The second time he'd learned the hard lesson was when the war finally ended, and all the troopers were mustered out. They'd given him a choice of any world in the Human Network to go to, with a free house and a nice fat pension to boot. He'd chosen Earth. He wanted to go back to Ohio, thinking he'd settle back in easily enough now that he was older and wiser than the first time he'd tried to go home.

But Ohio wasn't there anymore. The whole place had been "environmentally mitigated," and all traces of human history had been scrubbed from the forests and fields. And the rest of Earth was just too strange. No one talked right; nothing seemed familiar, and even the food tasted weird. So, he'd gone back to the Fleet once more, but there was no longer any war to fight, and the Fleet didn't need old troopers for anything.

"We have this planet," they'd told him then, the Fleet counselors whose job it was to deal with old vets like him. "It's called Dernhelms Colt." And then they told him about Project Mayfield. It seemed other vets were having problems adjusting too, so the government had set up a colony on a Fleet garrison world named Dernhelms Colt, a world at the far end of human space that had been run by the military since before the war had even started. This colony was reserved especially for "time-displaced" vets like him, who were having troubles adapting anywhere else. The shrinks said that being a military world, run by the brass and having the military culture the old vets had grown used to, would make adjustment to civilian life easier to handle. It came with the house and the pension and free regen shots too. He hadn't hesitated for a second to sign on.

He had met his Jenny on the trip out from Sol. She had been a Navy gal, an Officer no less. She was 300 years younger than him, but they were about the same age. They had hit it off right away and were married just a few months after they made planet fall at Mayfield. Mayfield was what all the old vets in the program would always call it, never Dernhelms Colt. That name was for the brass and the government and the mapmakers to use.

That was 20 years ago. He pulled another dandelion and tossed it into his bucket and slowly straightened to stretch the ache out of his lower back. Jenny, and their boy Tommy, was the best thing that had ever happened to him. He bent down again and snatched up the full bucket of dandelions and walked over to his mulch pile to toss them. From his backyard he could look out over the wide river valley below and see Landis City shimmering in the distance, where Jenny had gone to spend the day shopping. Things had turned out pretty well for him, he reflected, and breathed a great breath of spring air and turned his face to the sun and smiled.

His phone started buzzing. He pulled it out of his pocket. It was Jenny.

"Hey babe! I was just thinking of youÑ"

"Tom! Tommy's gone! The station's gone!" She was hysterical and crying.

"What? What are you talking about?" He turned to the southwest and looked up in the sky, but he couldn't see anything but blue air. His son Tommy was 18 years old and had taken a job working on the docks up on the orbital station.

"We're under attack. The station's been hit. Oh God! I think Tommy's gone." She was weeping.

"Honey. Where are you? Get yourself home here."

"I'm in the car. I'm still in the city. Command announced we're under attack and everyone's supposed to muster at their rally points."

Everyone in the Mayfield project were retired military and nominally still under military command, and the military always had a contingency plan. Always.

"What the hell!" Jenkins roared.

"I'll be there in a bit, just as soon as I can get through this traffic. Meet me atÑ" the phone went dead.

"Jenny! Jenny!" Jenkins screamed into the dead box. "Fuck!" He held the phone in one hand and smashed it with the balled fist of the other. Rage and panic overwhelmed him, and he turned and threw the useless phone against the wall of his house, smashing it into countless shimmering pieces. That turn saved him from being blinded, for at that moment a searing nuclear flash and fireball engulfed the city in the valley below. His decades of ingrained training and experience took over then, and he hit the ground and scrambled around the corner of the house to put something between him and the shock wave he knew was coming. He flattened himself against the foundation of his home and tried to bury himself in the dirt. Then the blast wave hit.

The rumbling basso of rushing tortured air engulfed the world around him. The house above him shuddered but stayed on the foundations and the earth he had buried his face in juddered until his teeth clacked. It was over after only a few seconds, and what seemed silence stuffed his abused ears like cotton after the all-consuming sound of the blast wave died away. He'd hugged dirt through worse nuke blasts before. This one was pretty low yield as he judged it and, he hoped, clean.

He pushed himself up off the ground and peered around the corner of his house back down toward the city. The smallish mushroom cloud had already risen thousands of feet into the air. It was shot through with a purplish rosy glow.

"Jenny É" he whispered, not feeling the tears that rolled down his cheeks. He allowed himself a moment of grief, and then his soldier's instincts took over again and he went into his house and dug out an old set of camos and armed himself. When he came back outside his neighbors were already gathering on the street. There was Georges and Connolly and Nikella, all troopers like him, and old Stanislaw the Navy Colonel from across the street who was already taking command and organizing everyone. Rafe, his nextdoor neighbor, walked up to him. He was wearing camos too and had a heavy beam rifle slung on his shoulder. His face was hard.

"Jenny?" Rafe asked.

"She was in town. Lara?" Jenkins asked back.

"She was too."

They acknowledged each other's loss with pursed lips and slight nods in the way of troopers who had lost far too many that had been close to them.

"This is some fucked up shit, man," Jenkins said.

"Looks like we're back in it, buddy." Rafe spit on the ground.

"For the long haul," said Jenkins, echoing the phrase that had been the watchwords of Fleet troopers for hundreds of years throughout the war.

"Hey!" Colonel Stanislaw shouted at them. "Saddle up, boys! Let's rally. We got boats coming down." He pointed up to the sky where a series of long contrails were scratching the stratosphere.

"Let's go!" And so, Tom Jenkins marched off to war once again.