Chapter Nineteen
She was comfortable in his arms and someone knocking on the door had her snarling. Her loving husband laughed at her. Alicia glared and curled deeper into the bed, she was warm and relaxed; she was not answering the door. Nathaniel pulled on his cargo pants and left the room pulling his shirt over his head.
Whoever it was better have a good reason, it was Friday night, shift was over and this not a good time. Nathaniel stepped back into the room and she grinned. "Got rid of them?"
"No. Get dressed." He tossed her shirt at her and Alicia moaned, crawling into it and finding a pair of shorts.
Running her fingers through her hair she tried to work out some of the tangles before she had to pull it up. Elisabeth Shannon looking altogether uncomfortable in their living room made Alicia freeze for a moment. Nathaniel stepped up behind her and gave her a push forward as he strapped on his weapon harness. "I think I'll go make sure the watch rotations are alert. Let you two visit."
"Right." She mumbled, pulling a tie around her hair, bundling it up off her neck; this was awkward. Things between her and the doctor were strained, she had told her about her pregnancy earlier in the week but she had taken her time getting to it and Alicia knew Elisabeth had been hurt. "Hey."
"Hi Alicia, I am sorry to drop in on you, clearly I've interrupted something but I do want to talk." The doctor hovered, seeming a little out of place.
"Sit, you want coffee or something?" Alicia looked around, uncomfortable herself; other than Zoe or someone looking for one of them they didn't have guests.
"No, I wanted to talk to you. Alicia I am sorry about the other day. Don't think I don't understand wanting to enjoy the secret of a baby and even from the outside I can understand wanting to keep it. The colony watches the two of you, and encroaches on your personal lives." Elisabeth dropped onto the couch, she sat on the other end; her protest silenced.
"And I need to apologize for being short with you, I do not enjoy working on you, or asking you to let me do so, but working on you is one thing. You and your baby, while safe does change things and puts my back up. No matter how safe or simple there is still and element of risk and it is on me."
"I should have told you, and I do know that you would have kept it quiet. It was exciting at first and then it was hard to think of telling anyone." And then she had trapped herself.
"I am glad you did and I am thankful you kept that dress."
"When we left we boxed up our stuff, we weren't sure we would ever see it again, it was sent through with the supplies on the second pilgrimage. I had a crate of personal stuff, I moved so many times on deployments that it was about all I had other than my gear pack and that came with me." And that was it, her lone crate had come through marked with her last name.
Each of them had been allowed to box up two crates to be shipped after them, if they made it. They had known they weren't going back, hadn't known whether they would survive, most had packed everything they could into those boxes. She didn't keep much other than her gear, the dress had come in a box of keepsakes, a few holos of her family, old books and the weapons from her grandpa's collection. She'd given Guzman her other crate for his daughter's stuff.
She hadn't seen any sense in bringing clothes beyond her uniforms which were a mandatory part of her gear and a few civvies she liked, those had gone in the pack that came with her. Household things they had to learn to source, Alicia hadn't even dreamed of having a house to herself until they'd gotten going on building the units and encouraged all of the officers to move out of the barracks.
Until Nathaniel it was mostly just a place to store her stuff and sleep; but over the years stuff had accumulated. It was only when she felt trapped that she realized how much it had become her space, and since she had married it was feeling more like a home. In five months it really was going to be a home, it was going to be the home that their little boy grew up in.
"Space in our packs was a prized commodity, thankfully it was just clothes and our personal items we needed to bring. Can you imagine having to pack everyone's furniture and household items through the portal?" Elisabeth shook her head, Alicia smirked a little; the woman had come in on the last pilgrimage.
"We didn't have to pack personal house holds through, but the supplies for fifteen hundred fully equipped units came through with the second; three days before they sent through the civilians. It was an operation." It had been something, they hadn't had a way to communicate with the world they left that first time they witnessed the portal open on this side; no way to warn the new comers what to expect or how their bodies would respond. There had been some tense moments.
"Until that point we only had three rovers and a cargo rhino. They sent through fifty rhinos and thirty rovers, each driven by a soldier joining the colony, each filled with supplies and hauling trailers with building materials. A lot of what we made the units out of was sourced here but the only building built before the second pilgrimage was the Command Center and the compound. For the first year we were alone here, we all lived there, the training facility was originally our barracks."
"That would have been challenging, I suppose you would have had some privacy; there couldn't have been many women." Elisabeth murmured, she could see the woman thinking it through; very few of the colonists knew about those days. It was the military that dealt with that.
"No, and no. I was the only woman, the original crew was hand picked. Guz, Mihal but he's gone, and I were from Nathaniel's unit and recruited in the planning stages. When we set up barracks my safety and privacy was being bunked over the Commander, it wasn't much different in the smaller tent camps."
Elisabeth's eyes went very wide and she laughed; to a civilian it had to sound odd. "You lived a year with that many men, all of you in one room. And what privacy or safety is being bunked over top of Commander Taylor?"
"We had concerns other than living arrangements. We were only in there to shower and sleep. And they did section off a shower stall for me. And no one would dare try anything, I was their CO and I trained all of them in hand to hand but the idea was that to get to my bunk to hassle me, snoop or anything else they literally had to climb over the Commander. He started that years ago." And while he felt it was a good idea it had often caused her problems, the last person she had always wanted bunking under her was her CO; but she knew there were a lot of women who had CO's that could have cared less.
"I don't know that I want to know why he did that." The woman commented, even though her eyes asked the questions.
"There was a string of issues in the camps we stayed in during the Somali war; early on. Camps we were in were small, close to the hot zone, usually consisted of command, medical and bunks. The bunks was one long tent meant to sleep a hundred soldiers. We were all special ops; there were probably a dozen units of six to ten rotating in and out of there. Not enough women to build a separate barrack and moved often enough that the idea was frivolous. They tried my bunk, I hit one and it woke some of the guys around me; one of them was Nathaniel." She shivered at the memory, it was insulting to everything she was, and she hadn't been a nurse from the tent hospital that hardly knew how to take care of herself.
But she had been asleep, they'd only gotten in from two weeks over the wire, and it had been a hard stretch so she'd been out flat. They'd nearly had her out of the bunk before she roused enough to fight, she'd been in base and they had celebrated that the wire had been pushed back even farther, that the camp would soon have to move closer to the enemy line; she had felt safe.
Their mistake had been while she had left a few rows between herself and the unit Nathaniel had a lower bunk only a few up. She had kicked out and thrown one off but Alicia still remembered hitting the floor when her CO had literally heaved the man with an intact face across the room; taking out a bunk and waking the entire tent to what had been nasty rumors circling. She had seen him mad but even now she couldn't remember another time he had been like that.
He had reamed the CO of the other unit, and command, there had been rumors he might get a rip for it. And rumors that they might ban female medical personnel from the wire camps, only allow active duty soldiers in them. But that rumor went around every time those sort of incidents came up and they came up because it had been her bunk where they got caught.
She was active duty but if they'd been a little gentler about it they might have gotten her out of the bunk and into a choke hold and she would have just been another rumor. If they'd got her, and she liked to tell herself, the protest would be, yet again, to ban women altogether from dangerous assignments. No matter how far the military came being a woman was always a fight.
After that the rule was set, as CO Nathaniel had the right to assign bunks and he did. He had rank so he got the better rack; she was on the top. And if his unit thought he was strict on propriety and honor before he doubled it. But whatever he said to command shook them. The two responsible were shipped home and tried in military court for sexual assault, dishonorable conduct, and crimes against the military, a catch all that simply meant they had jeopardized the war effort; for that to go to trial was rare and convicted on all counts as far as she knew both still sat in a brig.
"Sometimes I forget a little bit the life you lived before this. In reality I think all of us do. We don't really think about the wars, or the fight it must have been to build this place. I mean to come here, to be the second person through the portal; to be ordered to do it." Elisabeth sighed and Alicia winced, it was two years ago that Casey Durwin had spread that little known fact around, an attempt to guilt Nathaniel and at the time she didn't mind him feeling guilty; but people would not forget it.
"It wasn't quite like that. Nathaniel was offered it and when he agreed the military issued the orders and then he asked me if I would consider being his 2IC; I got papers as well, but I agreed. After that they did ask soldiers to sign up and picked from the list." And for over seven years no one knew that the military had issued paper on any of them, they had all gone with the advertisement that it was recruitment and lottery.
"But what if you had backed out? Either you or Nathaniel? Terra Nova wouldn't be the same and I sincerely doubt many others would have fought for what was right the way you two did."
"You might be surprised, the war was over but we lost a lot of people in it, there were only so many people with enough experience to go. They'd come through a war to have that experience, they wanted to survive same as we do." Every soldier saw a lot, and each handled it differently but a lot of them wanted a fresh start, a chance to change the way the world worked and that was exactly what Terra Nova was.
"Yes, Mark's favorite story. They were prepared to send the Commander but a record breaking young lieutenant too?" The woman laughed and had Alicia shifting a bit.
"They lost a lot of people, those of us who survived and had some rank and spec ops weren't too common. There were a lot of promotions when we got home."
"I've heard the story, I've heard a few different versions of it. And I didn't intend this trip into the past but I am thankful you ended up here; however it happened." Elisabeth reached out and took her hand, squeezing gently. "It has been a long time since we've talked but still you are tense with me."
Alicia started to speak but the woman silenced her. "I just realized this is the first time I have been in your home for any length of time, it suits you; both of you."
"Thanks." And it made her feel good to know that, sometimes it felt like they were both so used to temporary homes and work it was hard to keep it from being an extension of their office. The military had drilled both of them to be so neat that it always lacked the clutter that others seemed to have; she hoped their baby would change that.
Elisabeth chatted, moving onto a safer topic; wedding plans. Which thankfully did not require her to do more than smile, nod and make sounds of approval. Alicia heard the back door open and Boxer came tearing into the living room and bounced onto the couch; Nathaniel must have snuck into one of the back rooms.
It was another hour before she was able to let Elisabeth out, lock up and find Nathaniel, their evening in bed was gone and while Elisabeth was right, they had needed to talk, she was sort of disappointed. She found Nathaniel in the smaller of the spare rooms that now doubled as an office and workout room, the larger one had been emptied for a nursery.
She wasn't sure what they would do if their family expanded any more after this one. The standard unit only had three bedrooms, and a small sun room with a back door onto a patch of yard. But that problem was for down the line, right now she needed to get her husband to put work away.