Eternity In A Bottle

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say.

Janice remembered when the academy gave their spiel, tried to scare their students, and none of them had fallen for it. That had been thirty years ago. Since then, she’d spilled blood across more than a dozen systems, and scores of planets. It reminded her of the tried-and-true fact that nothing was as it seemed. The faces of enemy soldiers, complete with all manner of bodily designs and voices, were permanently burned into her mind. Though no sound traveled in a vacuum, she could hear them just fine.

As a soldier of the futuristic Scepter program, she’d been given a pitch from a recruiter the senior year of her academy. She’d left the vertical farms of Missouri to seek her fame and fortune in Interstellar Fleet, the military arm of the United Nations Space Enterprises. Terrestrial universities had proven to be a dead end, with the world having produced more than enough planet-bound engineers and scientists for a lifetime. She could earn enough to have a comfortable apartment and regular meals by doing differential equations for some bio-firm, but in order to truly have financial independence, she needed to get off planet. So, in her twenty-third year of life, she signed a document that put her through six years of biological editing and the harshest training regimen of her life.

From twenty-three to just a hair before her thirtieth birthday, she’d trained like an anime character, and that was when she wasn’t being stuck in a liquid pod and injected with god-knows-what. Fifty-thousand had been brought into the program with her and six hundred graduated. By the time she finished, she could bench press a delivery van or leap a five-story building. “You people,” the sergeant had said at her graduation, “are the ones who will save the war effort in Sector Gamma-Epsilon.” He gave them a grin. “Because you people don’t die right away and will punch right through their defenses.”

Simply put, the sergeant had been right. The five-three girl of twenty-three was now a six-five woman of thirty-two and had set down on the rocky planet of One-Three-Epsilon-Aleph. Earth had thrown human soldiers and their basic robots at the aliens for the better part of a decade long campaign and still hadn’t broken the initial defenses. Janice Kimberly and about thirty of her graduates had donned energy armor and punched their way through steel, concrete, and forcefield, ripping to shreds defenses that had withstood the best of Earth-Mars science for five years.

“Whatever that glowing blue crap they injected us with,” she remembered her ally Joe saying to her one time, “sure would’a come in handy during the Oort cloud invasion.”

She shrugged. “Yeah,” she agreed. The alien substance that made them strong would have come in handy when Earth and Mars were invaded by machines from beyond the Oort Cloud. It had taken years to restore food supplies, and in that time, millions starved. “But you can’t go back in time.”

“Yet,” he joked.

She rolled her eyes. “Yeah,” she replied. “I’m sure they’ll announce that any day now.”

That conversation had been a cool-down from her first mission as a super-soldier. She’d killed enemies that had resisted every normal infantry weapon thrown at them. It had taken her days to be able to get to sleep properly. The doctors used to have a sedative ready after each mission.

Now, Janice stepped into the transport, pulled off her armor, went to the Scepter showers, and washed the blood and stink of battle off her, ate, and went to sleep.

“It’s getting to me,” she thought out loud.

She washed the purple blood out of her hair with the latest industrial strength shampoo Earth had come up with and stepped into the wind chamber and a strong gust dried her off. A loud blare, three short tones, indicated the jump to hyperspace would come in a half hour.

“Jump to hyperspace one in thirty-one minutes,” the voice declared. “Be inside a protected chamber in fifteen minutes.”

“Lieutenant Colonel,” a soft-yet-loud voice introduced.

Janice turned. A smile donned her face. “Division Commander!” she noted. “I didn’t realize you were on this vessel.”

“Mind sitting and talking to me?” Division Commander Rick Sortarios asked.

“I was about to take dinner in my chamber,” she said. “As long as you’re out in ten, I’m up.”

He nodded. “I won’t take up too much of your time.”

They sat in her private room. Having risen through the ranks over the three decades of her service, she reached the rank that gave her a substantial private chamber. She sat at her small table and punched up her usual on the tablet. He followed suit. Two minutes later, a serving robot delivered two trays of food. She spoke in between bites. “So, what’s this about?”

He inhaled, paused as if bearing the weight of his words, then let it out. “I’ll be blunt,” he flatly stated. “Your service is coming to an end.”

“What?” She said, starting.

The shock that struck her curved in on itself. Not only was she surprised at her service ending, but she was also surprised by how much it shocked her.

He nodded. “Don’t worry,” he advised. “You’ve served a grand total of thirty years and eight months.” He pulled up her information on a tablet. “To earn full financial sovereignty, you only have to do five tours. You’ve done twenty-one.”

Somehow, and this really got to her, she didn’t feel concerned about the money. No one starved anymore on Earth or Mars due to lack of money. They instituted a program called Financial Security in the later twenty-fourth century. Once a person turned eighteen, they had the choice of doing nothing, and living in basic quarters and eating basic meals, enough for subsistence, or to enter the university for one of a few dozen potential careers. A person earned the right to purchase any good at a specific level of Financial Security. It meant no one could own a mansion or a private jet, and no one was homeless. Full Financial Sovereignty was the sole exception to this. People who’d gone to extraordinary lengths for the sake of humanity could have whatever they wanted, within reason. It was humanity’s way of saying, “hey, you almost died a dozen times, here’s some fancy clothes and a big fancy house.”

“I just…” she began. The words died in her throat, as she sat, her mind racing to find the thought fragments and piece them together. “I just don’t understand. How can they spend so much time and effort turning us into what in the old old days would’ve been called superheroes, and then retire us?”

He let out a chuckle. “I hear ya,” he agreed. “The answer? Simple. Programmable matter. It’s the new ‘weapon of choice.’ People with big strong arms who can take a plasma shot and heal in a few minutes are old news.” He tapped her bulging biceps lovingly. A second blare of the warning bell indicated the two-minute warning. “Well, we’ll talk more about this at the Jump Point in Sector Bet.”

He got up and left.

She sat and played the latest computer game from Earth on her tablet.

“Retired,” she said.

She looked at her reflection in the turned off wall screen. At the age of sixty, she looked like she had at twenty-three when she entered the program. That was the chief benefit of accelerated healing. Even so, she could see mentally what was not visible: the psychological scars of thirty years of combat.

“Now I’m gonna go home and watch entertainment feeds for the next thousand years?”

Somehow, that bothered her more than the war.