Stratton’s parents are stone-faced during the whole thing. His father, tall and imposing, takes the flag from her without a word of acknowledgment. When Captain Lopez holds out his hand to offer thanks on behalf of a grateful Commonwealth, Mr. Stratton throws the folded flag at him. It smacks into the Captain’s chest and falls to the ground, still folded into its tight triangle.
“You can take that and stick it up your ass,” he tells Captain Lopez. Then he turns to Jackson and takes the case holding his son’s medals out of her hands.
“I will have those,” he tells her. “But I have no use for that rag. Or for you. Now get the hell out of here and leave us with our son.”
Jackson knows this is deep, desperate grief talking. She knows the man doesn’t hate her personally, that his hate is aimed at the uniform she wears. Still, she feels a surge of shame and anger. She liked the kid, served with him for over a year, tutored him, shared meals and played cards with him. She doesn’t deserve this loathing directed at her. But there’s no point saying any of it to this grieving and angry man who is no longer a father thanks to some overconfident desk pilots at Battalion. The TA didn’t kill his son, but they put him in front of the gun that did.
Next to her, Captain Lopez bends over to pick up the NAC flag Mr. Stratton tossed at him. Jackson turns and walks out of the cemetery vault without waiting for her company commander. There is nothing more to say or do here. Maybe someday she can come back here and talk to the Strattons, tell them about the anger she will always feel for failing their son and surviving the battle when he didn’t, but today is not it.
On the way back to Shughart, she doesn’t speak another word to the Captain, and he doesn’t ask her anything else, which is good because she won’t have to tell him to go fuck himself. She considers telling him anyway, though. Thirty days in the brig seem like a good start at penance.
Chapter Six
Mazes
When the First Sergeant walks into the squad bay, Jackson is by herself, sorting out her kit and checking for defects.
He waves her off as she snaps to attention.
“As you were. Come over here and have a seat.”
She obeys and sits down at the table with the First Sergeant, who is the only person in the battalion that scares her as almost much as Sergeant Fallon.
“I need a squad leader,” the First Sergeant says. “After that clusterfuck last week, I’m short a few heads. You up for padding a squad with the rest of your guys?”
“What’s the drop?” she asks.
He looks at her and purses his lips.
“Charlie Company is doing a public safety sweep assist in Detroit-22. Fifth-gen PRC.”
Jackson feels a unsettling tightening in her chest.
Fifth-gen PRC. Good God.
“I’ll take a squad in Charlie,” she says. “Just keep my boys off the line for a few more days.”
The first-and second-generation PRCs were old school traditional thinking. High rises, none taller than twenty floors, laid out along wide streets, with parks and stuff in between. They meant to give it a regular neighborhood look and feel. All the oldest PRCs are first- or second-gen. They didn’t have to tear down the old cities, just clear blocks piecemeal for new high rises. They worked okay, for a while anyway.
The third-and fourth-gen PRCs were much the same, only they tacked ten more floors onto the maximum for the high rises and clustered them all together like small cities. Twenty to a cluster. Most of the worst shitholes are third- or fourth-gen, because they’re difficult to manage in a centralized manner. Too many people spread out over too many acres.
The fifth-generation PRCs—now those are something else entirely. The Commonwealth’s crowning achievement in efficient people storage. All the latest thinking in crowd control, food distribution, security, and space utilization.
Residence towers a hundred floors high. Built around a hollow core, for convection cooling and to let daylight in. Each tower with its own fusion plant, medic station, security office. A hundred floors, a hundred apartments per floor, average occupancy two. Those are the units. Four towers put together in a square, the spaces between them walled off with thirty-foot concrete dams. That makes a block. The plaza between the four towers is for public services—recreation, food distribution, shops, public safety, transit station. Each block is centrally managed, its own little city. Eighty thousand people put together in a square footprint a thousand feet on each of its sides.
Twelve of those blocks arranged in a much bigger square, four blocks on each side of the square—that’s a fifth-gen Public Residence Cluster. Forty-eight towers, split into blocks of four. Close to a million people in a fifth-gen, and that’s at designed capacity. Many hold one and a half, two times that number. In the middle of that gigantic square made up of residence blocks are the wastewater and garbage facilities, the main power plant, the food manufacturing and reprocessing stations, administration building, and the main law enforcement and detention center for the PRC. From here, the Public Housing Police can lock down blocks and quarantine them in case of public unrest, and send backup to the public safety stations in the twelve blocks. Three hundred sixty-seven acres, a little over half a square mile, and it’s a self-contained, compartmentalized, centrally managed city that houses and feeds over a million people. And the average metroplex has twenty or thirty of them.
In theory, the fifth-gen PRCs are easier to police than the older ones, and that’s mostly true. You can shut down a floor, a unit, a block, three blocks, the whole damn place, all remotely from the central law enforcement facility that sits in the middle of the PRC like a spider in the center of a web. For some reason, however, Jackson hates going into the fifth-gens. Maybe it’s because she grew up in a third-gen PRC, and she’s used to the warrens of high-rises clumped together. In a third-gen, you always have a place to run and hide. It’s sprawling and cramped, but everything is interconnected. The fifth-gens are so compartmentalized, you have choke points everywhere. Residence towers have two main entrance halls. Blocks have one entry and exit point, toward the middle of the PRC. It’s all too easy to shut down, too easy to trap people, funnel them like animals in a slaughter chute.
They drop into PRC Detroit-22 with a full company. It’s a lot of combat power, but Jackson knows that if things go to shit again, it won’t be enough, not even close. The four drop ships of Charlie Company circle the towers of the target block at a safe distance. Then the lead ship swoops in and lands on the roof of the ten-story civil administration building, down on the square between the residence towers. Jackson is with Second Platoon, and their drop ship does not follow. Instead, they circle around and settle on the roof of the outermost residence tower, a hundred floors up. Then the tail ramp drops, and Second Platoon’s thirty-six troopers rush out to deploy.
From up here, a thousand feet above the PRC, the view is actually almost beautiful, Jackson thinks. The streetlights and shop signs below illuminate the dirty night air in many colors. From up here, she can see clear across this PRC and into the next one, and the one beyond. A hundred thousand apartments, millions of people. Thousands of thefts, hundreds of assaults, dozens of murders committed right this second in her field of view. No guns allowed in public housing, but Jackson knows there are almost as many of them out there as there are people. You’d be foolish not to go armed in a place like this. Without teeth and claws, you’re food to everyone out on those streets.