Terms of Enlistment 01.2: Measures of Absolution Read Online Free

I'm not?" ask him.
    He nods at her uniform and points at the green beret with the Infantry badge tucked underneath the left shoulder board of my jacket.
    “You’re TA.  Annie was Navy. Military Police."
    Jackson doesn't know how to interpret his use of the past tense, and she doesn't have a way of clarifying his statement without playing her own hand, so she just shrugs.
    "So what do you want?" Mr. McKenney says.  "If she owes you anything, you've come to the wrong place.  She hasn't been home in two years.  I haven't even talked to her on vid in a month or two."
    "It's nothing like that," she says.  She takes refuge in action and pulls the dog tag out of her pocket. She puts the tag in front of Mr. McKenney, and he glances at it for a moment before picking it up.  Jackson watches as he turns the worn steel tag between his fingers slowly.
    "Where'd you get this?" he says after a few moments.  "I didn't even know she still had hers."
    She could tell him that she yanked the tag off his daughter's neck after she shot her dead, two days ago and almost two thousand miles away.  She has come all the way from Shughart to deliver that battered little piece of sheet steel, and maybe find a measure of absolution in the process.  She doesn’t feel shame for having killed Anna McKenney--she tried to kill Jackson’s squad mate, after all. Jackson is sorry she had to kill her, this man's only child, but she’s not ashamed, because she did what she had to do to save Grayson’s life.  When she came here, she fully intended to come clean and tell her parents what happened to their daughter that night in Detroit, and that she won't ever come home again.  Now that she’s sitting here, across the table from the man who changed Anna McKenney's diapers when she was little, the man who probably taught her to ride a bike and tie her own shoelaces, she just can't bring up the courage to face his reaction.
    "I found it," she tells Mr. McKenney instead.  "On the street, in Detroit, a week and a half ago."
    He shifts his gaze from the tag in his hand to her, and then back to the tag.
    "Is there more to that story, or an I supposed to believe you came all the way out here just to return this thing?"
    "No, I didn't," she admits.
    "Didn't think so.  Where are you stationed, anyway?"
    "Shughart, sir.  It's just outside of Dayton, Ohio."
    "That's a pretty long way from Detroit."
    "We were on a call.  Didn't you hear about it on the Networks?"
    Mr. McKenney raises an eyebrow.
    "Hear about what?"
    "We were called in to put out a welfare riot," she says.  “”Broke a bunch of stuff.”
    “I haven't heard squat about that.  There hasn't been a big welfare riot since Miami last year, and they say the Chinks started that one."
    "Well," Jackson says, "I can assure you there was one, because we were right in the middle of it."
    "Anyone get killed?"
    She instantly recalls the dozens of bodies strewn in front of her squad's position after they opened fire on the surging crowd that had seemed determined to kill them with their bare hands.  She remembers Stratton and Paterson, cut down in an instant by heavy weapons fire, and crumpling to the pavement like carelessly tossed duffel bags.  She thinks of the apartment building Grayson demolished with a MARS rocket.  She has no idea how many civvies their TA company killed that night, but if the other squads were only half as busy as theirs, they filled a lot of body bags.
    "Yeah," she replies.  "A few people got killed.  You mean it wasn't in the news at all?"
    "They don't usually advertise it when they send you people in to beat up on some welfare rabble," Mr. McKenney says.  "Can't blame 'em, really.  People might get the impression that the civil authorities can't control the PRCs."
    She opens her mouth to tell him that they were the ones who took the beating that night--eight troopers dead, one drop ship lost, and dozens of wounded--but when she reconsiders the equation, it seems like