Space Force: Building The Legacy
Page 12
“Then why do this? Why do any of this?!” the young airmen asked, exasperated.
Grantham thought for a second. Then he said, “Did you get a chance to look around outside, when we were working?”
“Yeah?”
“What’d you think of it?”
Padilla frowned. “Working outside of the dome?”
“Yeah,” Grantham said. “Specifically, the environment. “Did you not think it was pretty cool?”
“I suppose,” Padilla said, skeptical. “I mean, the light show in the clouds was kind of cool-”
“And the sand dunes?” Grantham asked. “The ice volcanoes?”
“Yeah, that’s something you don’t get see back home,” Padilla said.
“Exactly,” Grantham said. “Most of Earth will never get to come to Aldrin Station. They won’t get to see any of the crazy terrain or weather out here. What’s more, most of those folks will never get to know that their efforts are going towards making these places safe for eventual human exploration, or colonization. Meanwhile, I’ve spent eight years of my life out here. Made it through two battles, and my efforts were partially responsible for victory on both fronts. When my grandkids are sitting on my knee, having been able to safely travel and explore worlds without fear of being attacked by the likes of the Kalanuskanites, or creatures like them, I’ll be able to tell them, ‘Yeah, I was out there. I helped pave the way.’ And so will you.”
Padilla frowned in thought. “And that’s why you were content to stay out here? That’s really enough?”
For the first time, Stargeant Grantham gave Spaceman First Class Padilla a smile of encouragement. “Trust me, bud, it’s enough.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Brennen Hankins has spent the bulk of his career in the military with his feet on the ground—working for the Air Force. That little slice of irony hasn’t kept him from looking to the sky, however, even if he never will become a “Space Stargeant”. Having grown up ranching in Oregon, and later, fishing commercially in Alaska, Brennen now lives in central Montana, with his brother and a perpetually hungry and mischievous Siberian Husky for company. Follow his mad ramblings and night photography photos at www.oldhatnation.com.
EDITOR’S NOTE
Military service isn’t always a pleasant occupation, and sometimes the duty is troublesome. But all military vets can attest that the job needs to be done, whether we like it or not. It’s hard to see the bigger picture when you’re at the pointy end of the spear.
WHAT WE LEARNED FROM THE FIRE
Ali Abbas
A rainbow plume shot into the sky, licking up against the smoke-laden clouds with a tongue of green and blue, backlit with amber and orange. An explosion in a chemical factory perhaps. Murjan resisted the urge to climb back into his exo-armour to plot the point on a schematic overlay of that district. It didn’t matter anymore.
The whole city was on fire. The night was lit by constellations of flame, the ruddy glow twisting between silhouettes of buildings, hollow arches and sightless windows. He leaned forward onto the ledge of the landing platform, swivelling his hips to release some of the tightness in his lower back. It felt like he had been in the exo-armour for weeks. It slumped behind him in its standby position, with just enough power for its self-destruct sequence. Another fire to light before he left this cursed planet.
A pair of gloves slapped down on the ledge beside him. The nut-brown, sweat grimed hands of his captain stretched out towards the blazing city as if warming them, flexing to relieve the cramping from hours of battle.
“A damned waste,” Murjan said.
“My old CO used to say that no day is a waste when you learn something.” Her voice was hoarse from the dry filtered air of the exo-armour, and the stream of orders and information she relayed to her team. Murjan found he missed the filtered air.The atmosphere was heavy with the char weight of burned stone, wood and flesh. It was all overlaid with the tang of munitions, and the toxic high notes of melting battery packs.
“What is there to learn from this shit show?”
“War is hell. Our ability to destroy always outstrips our ability to build. No plan survives contact with the enemy. Take your pick.”
“OK, what did we learn that we didn’t know already?” He twisted to ease the tension in his neck, shook his head and looked across at her.
The captain didn’t answer. From a pocket she pulled out a crumpled pack of cigarillos, tapped one out and lit it in smooth, well-practised motions. There was one remaining in the packet, which she left on the ledge.
“You’re a cliché, you know that, right,” Murjan snorted.
“Tradition kid. When nothing makes sense, when there is nothing to celebrate or mourn and you’re just feeling empty, you can always fall back on tradition. You want one?”
“Why the hell not. It’s not like we can smoke on board for the next however many months.” He pulled out the final cigarillo and flicked the empty packet over the ledge into the dull glow of fires below.
The captain passed hers over so he could light his own, the end glistened with her spit. He took a deep drag and added a grey stream from his nostrils to the smog.
“Well?” he asked.
“Well what?”
“Any pearls of wisdom, any sense to be made from all this?”
She leaned down and pulled off her boots, the sides zipping with a rasp. She put the boots on the ledge as well. There was a hole in her right sock. She dragged those off too and draped them on her boots. They lay damp and limp. She sighed, pressing her toes into the cold concrete. She rocked back and forth for a moment cooling her feet.
“Here’s one. The stench of battle masks our own stink.” She raised an eyebrow to ask if that was good enough for him.
He considered her words, watching the city burn. There was a greasy, sticky texture to his skin under his uniform. But for the miasma of the war, he would probably have gagged on the sour melange his body had created.
That was not what she meant.
Following orders brought them here. Orders that existed because politicians had failed, or succeeded, it was sometimes hard to know which. But it was not orders that unloaded kilos of bullets through their rail guns, and poisoned streams and rivers with osmium tipped uranium. Orders did not discard piles of emptied magazines, nor hurl depleted battery packs indiscriminately from the powered arms of exo-armour to explode in a hail of bullets.
That was not what she meant either, at least not all of it.
People lived in this city once. How many made it out? How many were hidden in cellars and transit systems, asphyxiating as the firestorm left the planet a cinder, cooked slowly in their false sanctuaries?
He didn’t even know the name of the planet. Maybe it had some assigned taxonomy, a way to keep it ordered on a list. Or perhaps it was discovered by an early explorer, flying on fumes and delighted to discover a place of life and hope, and named for that. It might have been terraformed against overwhelming odds or hosted the remains of some awe-inspiring precursor race. He had never thought to ask.
Somewhere a strategy was laid, decisions made. This place was determined as a location to fight over. Leaving nothing may have been the intention. He didn’t know. What he did know was that it was his body in the armour, his finger on the trigger. That was part of what she meant, but she also meant it was his conscience that had absolved itself of the consequences.
“That’s kind of close to sedition Cap.”
“If you choose to hear it that way. So was your question, if I chose to interpret it so. If I burn, we burn together.”
Her cigarillo was balanced between her thumb and forefinger. She sent it spinning into the dark, the tip glowing, leaving a spiral trail and then lost in a gout of flame as if a dragon had emerged from its den to snuff it out with a breath.
“Mutually assured destruction then,” Murjan ob
served.
“Mutually desired survival. That’s probably the real lesson here. Whatever the hell this is, we’re in it together.”
The captain pinched her sodden socks and boots between her fingers and turned stiffly away, exhaustion written in her movements.
“Cap, did we win?”
She stopped.
“Yeah, I got the stats through before I shut down my suit. Absolute numbers and percentage of men and materiel lost. We were up on both counts. Command is calling it a win.” She put her free hand on his shoulder and patted. “And we won too. You and me, because we get to walk away from this one. Maybe the best thing about all this, about being alive, is just not being dead.”
He nodded. It wasn’t profound, but it was a truth. She put a small device on the ledge beside him, pressed a button. A light began to blink slowly. She’d set the self-destruct on her exo-armour, the other suits were slaved to it. This operation was over.
“Ten minutes, kid. Get yourself up the ramp and strapped in.”
He heard her aching legged gait shuffle to the waiting transport, her low toned greeting to other survivors. Other victors.
They might be months on the carrier, waiting for the next deployment. He took a long last look across the desolation they were leaving behind.
The exo-armour didn’t just filter smells, it blocked out sounds, providing only that information which was required to fight. Explosions, the concussive patter of projectiles against its skin, the screams of his adversaries did not pierce its metal walls. Even the cries of his fallen comrades were caught in its buffers and suppressed. That selective sound of war he was used to.
The cacophony of destruction was new. He had watched this aftermath before on holos, but each time the reporters spoke over a muted death scape. No one had ever revealed how noisy hell could be. Walls collapsed, fires roared, sucking oxygen from the sky, belching black gouts back. Transporters battered the atmosphere.
Somewhere on another continent, perhaps as close as the other side of the city the enemy was staging its own evacuation, blowing its machines to render them unusable, as if anyone was coming to spend the fuel to lift them off-world again. Percussions hammered out everywhere.
Soon enough this tattoo would be drummed out on another planet. Perhaps the only meaning was that it didn’t mean anything.
The light blinked a little faster. He stubbed out the remains of his cigarillo on the ledge and hobbled on aching feet up the ramp to the transport, buckled himself into the bucket seat and twisted to look out of the window behind him.
There was a lurch as the transport boosted off the platform, beneath him an array of new fires blossomed, the suits perforating the platform in one final act of destruction.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ali Abbas is the author of “Like Clockwork”, a steampunk mystery published by Transmundane Press. His shorter fiction has been published by Mad Scientist Journal, Transmundane Press, Death’s Head Press and Darkhouse Books, and has featured on Every Day Fiction, Scarlet Leaf Review and Crimson Streets. He has had a succession of jobs which might be called a career, of which two years were spent as a civilian contractor to the military, including three nights sleeping in the junction box crawl space of a Royal Navy destroyer. Ali maintains a blog at www.aliabbasali.com and a full list of published works and free-to-read stories can be found on his author page www.authoraliabbas.weebly.com
EDITOR’S NOTE
One thing is certain. Mankind always looks over the next horizon. And in doing so, we’ll meet others of like nature. We’ll make friends, allies. We’ll make enemies. And sometimes those enemies will become friends. But we’ll persevere. It’s our nature.
VISITORS
Karl K. Gallagher
“Captain Micheletti! Do you still have that pet tarantula?”
Micheletti rocketed to his feet. Dammit, there were supposed to be announcements when a general was on the base.
“Yes, sir. They live for—yes, sir.” In their previous encounters Colonel McNair hadn’t been interested in spider trivia. Becoming Major General McNair probably hadn’t made him curious.
“Good. Grab your hat.” McNair turned and headed for the door. Aides hopped out of his way.
Micheletti pulled his hat from its cubby and followed the general. A short V-22 ride took him from Buckley Space Force Base to Peterson.
A car was waiting when they landed. Ten minutes later MG McNair was waving his aides back as he took Micheletti into the secure holoprojector room. When he closed the door the two of them had the room to themselves.
McNair pressed a button on the wall.
A tarantula-like creature appeared in the middle of the room. It stood tall enough its eyes were at the same level as Micheletti’s. The legs spread ten or twelve feet across.
He took a couple of steps forward to take a closer look. “It’s not a spider. It has ten legs and four body segments. Only four eyes. The mouth arrangement is wrong.”
Micheletti took a step back. “It’s not even in the same class. This is a new class in phylum arthropoda. How big is it?”
“That’s life size,” said McNair.
“But . . .” Telling the general that was impossible would be rude. And McNair wouldn’t be doing this for a fictional exercise. Which left . . . “Sir, is this an alien? Is this our first contact with aliens?”
“It is. They landed by one of our lunar outposts a week ago. The staff is trying to learn to communicate with them. Making good progress but we’re having a lot of turnover.”
“Turnover? In a week?”
McNair sighed. “Look at that wall.” He pointed past Micheletti.
He turned around. The wall with the door had several round dents about eye level.
The general continued, “Some people who saw the alien recoiled so hard their heads hit the wall. Others screamed or ran out. Most handle it better than that. The outpost crew filtered out their arachnophobes and rotated duty among the rest. But even regular people have the heebie-jeebies after a couple of shifts working with, with the aliens.”
Micheletti realized McNair was standing with his back to the hologram.
“We ran a search for arachnophiles among our most highly cleared personnel. Struck out. Started looking for ones with any clearance. Then I remembered you and your pet.”
“I can’t be the only one, sir.”
“We found an inactive reservist we’re calling back to active duty. She’ll be your assistant.”
“What’s my role?”
“You’re the ambassador.”
Micheletti gulped. “Yes, sir.”
“You’re launching for the Moon tomorrow morning. Give your sizes to my aide and he’ll get you suited up.”
After doing that Micheletti recovered his phone from the security desk. He called his girlfriend. “Hey. I’m sorry, I need to ask a favor.”
“Sure, Alan. What’s up?” said Julie.
“I’ve been pulled onto some temporary duty. Can you feed Athena for me?”
“Of course. Doing anything interesting?”
“Can’t say. You know the military.”
“Yeah. Well, tell me if it’s ever declassified. Are we still on for this weekend?”
Micheletti winced. He’d still be on the way to the Moon then. “No. I’m sorry. I don’t know how long this will last. I’ll forward you the tickets. You can take a friend.”
After the call he sent her the email with the tickets to the musical. He hoped he could keep in touch with her from the Moon. He’d been having serious thoughts about Julie. If he went into a communications black hole for years he couldn’t expect her to wait without an explanation.
The rest of the day was a compressed version of the “how to survive on the Moon” class everyone had to take before going up there. The normal class was a month long.
When
Micheletti expressed concern over how much was being left out the instructor said, “Don’t worry. You’re the ambassador so you can delegate all the maintenance and equipment operations.”
Which made sense. But it forced him to consider how suited he was for this role. He was succeeding in Space Force as a technical officer. He won respect by wringing the best possible performance out of satellites. Not by inspiring enlisted men to work harder.
“Ambassador” was a people-person job.
Micheletti was not a people person.
On the other hand, a regular ambassador was trained in the subtleties of human behavior. Maybe someone who had the nerdy urge to analyze behavior from scratch was a better fit for dealing with aliens.
That relaxed him enough to fall asleep on the flight over the Rockies to the White Sands Launch Port.
He even slept through the landing. A major woke him as they taxied up to the rocket pad. A New Glenn booster stood on the pad, wisps of LOX vapor blowing about the base as the tanks were topped off.
Micheletti took a moment to stare at the rocket. As much as he loved space, he’d never expected to leave Earth. Ninety-nine percent of Space Force spent their careers on the ground. The astronauts came from outside, fighter pilots or hands on scientists.
Now he was going up.
The major handed him a pair of readers and an envelope. “There’s everything we’ve gotten from the Moon so far. Here’s your orders. The vehicle is a secure environment once you’re off the ground. You can open them after you lift.”
A staff car pulled up to the pad.
“This should be your assistant, Captain Quam,” said the major. “Good luck, Ambassador.” He saluted, despite being higher rank.
Micheletti returned it.
The major marched off, leaving behind the sergeant carrying Micheletti’s dufflebag.