This is a rough business. Newsfolk see a lot of things they'd be better off not seeing, and they move around so much they make very few close friends. Only the luckiest of us find a spouse who can roll with the punches enough to stay contracted to us. And now that the world has erupted into 'brush wars' again, it's even worse. We get sent into the middle of it with nothing but a wrist-cam, our satellite transmission codes, and a lot of hope.
Still, I've kept a fond, though hardly fatherly, eye on Tarissa Harlock since the first time I saw her. At first, I watched her because they had told me our rival 'cast had hired a reporter who was very young. That meant that she had to have plenty on the ball: First-ins have to have an eye for the breaking story, another for knowledgeable participants who are willing to be interviewed, and still a third for incoming fire.
You wouldn't believe how many people we have lost in the past two years, even though we wear the glow-suits that are supposed to exempt us from hostile action. I've come to believe they just set us up as good, clear targets.
Anyway, I was looking for Tarissa at the first Media-Con she attended. And she was worth looking for, I realized when I located her. She was right up front by the speakers' rostrum, talking a blue streak to that little fink from the Chindian coalition ... CIC they call themselves. I always pronounce it 'sick.' I may live by the Compact, but I don't have to enjoy it.
She was a tall redhead, very slender, with a face right off a medieval tapestry. She was tapping out something on her note-comp, all the time they talked. I could see her hand moving slightly in her jacket pocket. I wondered what the hell she could find to take notes about with that idiot. Then I forgot to wonder ... she smiled as she answered a question.
I'd forgotten that smiles of that sort existed. Most of the ones I see are cynical or wicked or weary or just simply evil to the core. This was a smile so full of real and tender concern that I thought, Lady, you'll never last! You've got to be as callous as a surgeon, in our business. They'll tear you into little pieces and spit you into the gutter.
I didn't speak to her. I was an old pro, twice her age. What would I say to someone like her, who hadn't washed the stardust out of her eyes, yet? I didn't expect to see her again, either, but two nights later, on the late 'cast I always monitor to see what the competition is up to, I heard a voice that just had to be hers. I turned on the holo (I usually just listen, so I won't have a roomful of blood and guts) and there she was.
It was a process shot. She was superimposed on a wide-angle scene in the Far East. She was telling the story of that little CIC guy ... better by orders of magnitude than he could ever have done.
It was a masterful job. She'd taken a nobody and wrung out of him the things that made him and most of his kind tick. She had made the reasons for our current pact seem reasonable, damn her. I like to hang onto my prejudices ... they're most of what I own.
Anyway, from that night on I watched every time she was set for a spot. I kept up with her assignments. I sweated her through the flare-up in New Pan-Persia, cursing her crazy way of getting right up where things were hottest. We may not be using nukes, but a laser rifle or even a chip of rock that's been hit and sent zinging can kill you just as dead.
Of course, I couldn't keep up all the time. I was pretty busy on my own. South America came to a boil again, with border squabbles popping up here and there. I jumped around that crazy jumble of mountains and jungles and plains and slums and metropolises for eight months, keeping one step ahead of death and destruction all the time. And then I hopped a bit too slowly, for once, and an old-fashioned lead slug caught me in the right hip.
They do marvelous things, nowadays, with joints. I could walk without a limp in less than a year. But there was no way that I could ever do first-in work again. I just wasn't fast enough; at my age, you don't bounce back from that sort of trauma the way you do at twenty.
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