by Marko Kloos
“Just you and me and the squirrels,” Halley says. “Let’s do it. Let’s freeze our butts off and eat cold sandwiches under the stars. We’ll be cooped up in a spaceship again soon enough.”
She takes my hand and gives it a firm squeeze. My grief is still raw, and I know that I will be mourning for a long time, but as we walk down the street in the autumn sunshine side by side, the world that had felt askew this morning has righted itself again just a little.
CHAPTER 2
BETWEEN WORLDS
I don’t ever delude myself into thinking that Liberty Falls is the real world. Reality is what I can see out of the window of my train compartment as the maglev glides east at three hundred kilometers per hour, slicing through neighborhoods that get denser and more cluttered the closer the train gets to the Greater Boston metroplex. This is the real world, welfare clusters with residence towers that reach half a kilometer into the sky, tens of thousands of little apartment boxes stacked on top of each other to get as many people into as small a footprint as possible. This was our life before I joined the Corps and got Mom out of the PRC.
But even that world has gotten measurably better in the last few years. The improvements are small but visible. The trains are cleaner and better maintained, and the neighborhoods we pass have fewer dilapidated and burned-out blocks among them. There aren’t as many security locks in the transit stations, and I don’t see a quarter of the police presence that used to be out before the PRCs caught fire and the Lankies showed up in orbit one day. Whatever we were before the Lanky war started, the threat we survived has served to realign priorities in the North American Commonwealth. For the first time in my life, I’m feeling that the majority of us are pulling on the same end of the rope for a change. The cities are still no paradise, but at least they’re no longer the front lobby of hell.
I’m in uniform again, as required by the regulations for travel from and to a duty station. On our stop at Boston’s South Station, the compartment fills up to the last seat, and a young man takes the spot right across from me. He nods respectfully, and I return the gesture before looking out of the window again. The uniform gets more attention now than it did before, when soldiers were mere curiosities, relics of an abstract profession that did unknowable things out in the colonies between the stars. After the Lanky incursion, everyone knows what we do and why we are here.
“Are you in the Fleet, sir?” he finally asks after glancing at my uniform for a few minutes without wanting to be obvious about it.
“Yes, I am,” I reply.
“Oh, I thought you were. I’ve just never seen anyone with a red beret like yours.”
I look at the scarlet beret that’s tucked underneath the epaulette on my left shoulder.
“You won’t see too many of those,” I say. “It’s a combat controller beret. There are maybe a hundred and fifty in the whole Fleet.”
“What do you do? I mean, if you don’t mind my asking. Unless it’s a secret.”
“Combat controllers land on enemy planets with the advance force. We call down air support and mark targets for the strike fighters, that sort of thing.”
“Have you been in battle?” the kid asks. I can tell he’s practically humming with barely suppressed interest. I look at him and try to figure out his origin and social status. His teeth are white and straight, and he is dressed well, so he’s a ’burber out on the town. He looks like he’s about eighteen or nineteen, well fed and healthy.
“I have,” I say. “I’ve been doing this for twelve years. Since the start of the Lanky war. I think I was around for all the big fights.”
“Like Mars?” he asks.
“I was there. Not a fun time, though. None of them were.”
“I can imagine,” he says.
Like hell you can, kid, I think.
“What . . . what’s it like? Out there, I mean. Fighting those things.”
I look at his earnest face, and suddenly I feel very old, even though I probably only have fifteen years on this kid. Whenever I talk to well-meaning civilians about the things that go on in war, it feels like I am communicating through a translator that never quite gets the words right. How do I tell him what it feels like to stand on the surface of another planet and see a group of twenty-meter creatures approaching your firing line, and how the weapon in your hand suddenly feels pointless and feeble? How do I wrap in words what goes through your head when you have to descend into a pitch-black tunnel to flush out monsters that can crush you into bloody paste with the swing of an arm? I may only have a decade and a half on him, but the things I’ve seen and done in that time are so alien to his own life experience that it’s almost like we are separate species at this point. He lacks a frame of reference to put the things I could tell him into a context that would make sense.
“It’s scary,” I tell him instead, even though the word is entirely inadequate. But it’s a word that he expects, an emotion that he can parse, so he nods knowingly.
“I put in an application with the recruiting station,” he says. “I want to be on a starship. Be a weapons tech or something. But my friend says they’ll put you in whatever job they think you’re best for. He says I’ll probably end up in the infantry because they always need people there. That I should just withdraw the paperwork while I can.”
“The grunt life is hard on people. Even if it’s just four years.”
We ride in silence for a while. My stop is the next one on the line, so when the system announces that we’re approaching Falmouth station, I get up to gather my bag and head for the door at the end of the train car.
“Any words of advice?” the kid says when I open the door of our compartment. “I mean, in case they accept me.”
I know that as a Commonwealth Defense Corps officer, I should be supportive of willing new recruits, encourage them to join up and fill the ranks, present a positive image of the service. I am proud of all I have done while wearing this uniform, and I am not ashamed of the Corps in the least. But I can’t bring myself to serve up some rah-rah bullshit to this fresh-faced kid, who doesn’t know what it’s like to have to wake up with nightmares about monstrous things in deep, dark places almost every night. He doesn’t know what he’s volunteering to take on, the years of cumulative trauma that will fracture his body and mind, and he doesn’t know that he’ll never be able to put himself together quite right no matter how hard he tries.
“Listen to your friend,” I say. “He sounds like a very smart guy.”
My transport is a regular supply flight to Keflavík. I sit in the back in one of the sling seats along the side of the hull, sharing the cargo hold with ten other CDC troopers and several tons of supply pallets strapped to the floor. The cargo bird is cramped and noisy, but I’ve been a grunt for so long that I can snatch a nap anywhere and anytime, so I prop my head against the ballistic lining of the hull and drift off for most of the three-hour flight.
I wake up when we start our descent. Unlike a military spacefaring drop ship, the atmospheric craft have windows in the cargo hold, and the early-morning sun over the ocean is painting the sky outside in diffused shades of purple and orange.
Even after four months here, the view from above hasn’t gotten old. It’s a clear morning over Iceland, and the rocky coastline appears below us like the shore of a distant colony moon. Joint Base Keflavík has become a busy spot in the last few years. Our flight is one of several inbound craft, all lined up like pearls on a string in the airspace above the shore, position lights blinking. A few dozen kilometers to the northeast, the skyline of Reykjavík stands outlined against the mountains. At just under a million people, the city holds three-quarters of the Icelandic population, but it’s still a very quaint place compared to the metroplexes of the NAC or the big continental European cities. Iceland is mostly volcanic rock and ice, which makes it the closest thing we have on Earth to the environment of the typical upstart colony out in space, and it’s situated in the North Atlantic, halfway between the NAC and the
Euros. All of those factors combined make it the ideal spot for the new International Special Tactics School, where I’ve been a part of the NAC special operations team that’s teaching our allies how to fight off-world.
The school is so new that the logistics and transport chain is still a provisional patchwork. The complex is located on the other end of the island, but the drop ships can’t land there directly because the base is small and has no facilities for heavy transports yet. That means I have to disembark at Keflavík base, check in with the military transfer desk, and catch one of the old tilt-rotor craft they use for ferrying people around locally. By the time the sergeant at the transfer desk has found me an outbound flight and sent me on my way to the ISTS, I’ve spent more time on the ground in Keflavík than I did on the flight from Falmouth. When the ancient, noisy tilt-rotor airplane finally descends onto the short gravel runway at the ISTS base, my back hurts from sitting in uncomfortable sling seats for hours, and I am glad to step out of the bone shaker and onto the Icelandic soil.
If Liberty Falls isn’t the real world, Iceland isn’t exactly it, either. Almost everyone here lives in Reykjavík and a handful of smaller cities by the coast, and there are some towns and villages dotting the landscape. But most of the island is gravel and glaciers, uncluttered by people or settlements. The ISTS base is a cluster of low-slung prefabricated buildings halfway down the coastline of a narrow fjord, intentionally built with modular colonial architecture and ringed by only the barest minimum of security measures. The closest town is a fishing village at the end of the fjord, ten kilometers to the west of the base, but there’s nothing but gravel and puffins in between, and no reason for anyone to even venture close. The only reminder that we are still among civilians on Earth is the occasional fishing boat making its way down the fjord toward the ocean or back home to the pier. It’s every bit as unnatural an environment to me as the relaxed tranquility of Liberty Falls. Most people never get to live in a place this empty and unspoiled.
I make my way from the landing strip to the main building cluster. The gravel under my feet crunches with every step, and the air is cold and clean. Soon we will see the first snow of the season, and then this place will look a lot like New Svalbard for a few months.
It’s lunchtime, and as I cross the base, I have to return salutes from soldiers who are passing me on the way to the chow hall. The ISTS trains soldiers from allied nations in the ways of special space warfare, and the uniforms here are a diverse mix of various digital camouflage patterns: German, British, French, Norwegian, Dutch, Italian. Of the twenty-nine Eurocorps countries, only half a dozen have militaries big enough for Spaceborne Infantry operations. It will take another half decade until the Euros have the gear and the training to operate their own independent off-world combat units. Until then, we show them the ropes and integrate them into our joint NAC operations. But the biggest contribution the Euros are making isn’t their man power, it’s their money. It let us rebuild our fleet and staff our ranks after being on the ropes against the Lankies for so long. It’s a good trade, and I am happy to help bring the Euros up to speed on the finer points of fighting in space in exchange for having new gear and a full personnel roster.
“Good afternoon, sir,” the corporal on duty says when I walk into the company office.
“Good afternoon, Corporal Keene. Where’s the company sergeant?”
“Master Sergeant Leach is out on the range with the rest of the training flight, sir.”
“Range day, huh? What are they shooting?”
Corporal Keene checks the duty roster on the screen in front of him. “Uh, rifles and sidearms, sir.”
“Is that the only thing on the schedule today?” I ask.
“Yes, sir. The master sergeant scheduled a ten-klick hump in armor this morning. I’m pretty sure he’s planning on having everyone march back from the range when they’re done. He didn’t pass down a request for vehicles except for the medical mule at the range.”
I nod and check my in-box for hard-copy missives. There’s a small stack waiting for me, and I pull everything out and organize the stack on the countertop.
“Coffee, sir?” Corporal Keene asks as I walk off toward my office.
“Affirmative,” I say. “Unless it’s Fleet swill.”
“No, sir. It’s the Italian stuff. From real beans.”
“Then most definitely affirmative,” I reply. “No creamer, just black.”
“Aye, sir.”
I walk into my office and put the stack of hard-copy printouts down on the desk. With every promotion, my offices have grown more spacious, and the base on Iceland is more plushly appointed than any of the NAC bases on the continent. The room is almost as large as the welfare apartment I shared with my mother in the Boston PRC, and the furniture is high-quality resin laminate from Scandinavia, stark white and functional. From my window, I can see the shoreline and the fjord beyond. Overhead, the departing tilt-rotor transport disrupts the tranquil scene momentarily as it takes off from the landing strip and ascends into the cloudy sky with the sharp drone of turboprop engines at full throttle. I watch it disappear in the low cloud ceiling and listen to the sound it trails until the droning hum fades away.
Corporal Keene walks into my office and puts a coffee mug down on my desk next to the stack of papers.
“Thank you, Corporal,” I say. He nods and turns to get back to the company office. His Fleet fatigues are starched and pressed, and the sleeves are rolled very precisely and without a visible crease or wrinkle. The last time I rolled sleeves to that level of precision, I was in Basic Training, and it took a good five minutes per sleeve. It’s a point of pride among special operations soldiers to show off just how far above the cut they are, and the extra effort of rolling a perfectly crisp sleeve seems to have come back into fashion among the younger, untested troops. For the second time today, I feel very old.
I take a sip of my coffee. It’s dark and rich, with the kind of intense flavor you can only get by roasting actual coffee beans and grinding them up into powder. Before the Euros joined their resources to ours out of necessity, the Fleet rarely had the means to spend on real coffee for the rank and file. Since then, the quality of the food has increased every year, and now the chow in the international bases and ships is even better than it was in the boot-camp mess hall when I joined up twelve years ago, back when the availability of real food was a major recruiting incentive to PRC kids brought up on soy and cheap carbohydrates.
The status screen on the wall across from my desk shows the current duty schedule and the disposition and medical status of every instructor and trainee in the company. The school has five different training companies, each specialized in a particular aspect of spaceborne special operations. My company is the combat controller and forward observer school where the Euros learn how to call down orbital strikes and close air support against Lankies. All my instructors are senior sergeants or company-grade officers with golden drop badges and combat experience. As the years since Mars have gone by, it has become more difficult to find suitable teachers. The senior NCOs have started to take retirement, and many of the officers who commanded platoons and companies in battle have been promoted into staff officer slots and pulled out of the field.
I study the board while I drink my coffee. Most of the status cells are green. Only a few red data fields indicate an unavailable instructor or sick or injured student.
This is my life now. I am a staff officer, and until I retire, I am almost certainly destined to fly a desk and look at personnel strengths and assignments. I’ll be holding a cup of coffee far more often than a rifle or a pistol. This is what Halley and I pictured as our ideal permanent careers when we got through Basic Training—a few years of excitement and danger, and then an easy life in a shore-duty billet until retirement.
But when you’ve been in the podhead business for so many years, sometimes you just want to break a sweat and pull a trigger.
“Corporal Keene,” I call throug
h the open door into the adjoining company office.
The front desk corporal appears in the doorway a moment later. “Sir?”
“Did the armory sergeant go up to the range with the flight this morning?”
“Yes, sir. He did. But he left Corporal Lopez in charge of the armory.”
I put my half-finished coffee down on the desk and get out of my chair.
“Good. Because I think I’m going to check out my rifle and join the rest of the company at the range. If anyone comes looking for me, let them know that I’ll be out in the field for the day.”
“Aye, sir,” Corporal Keene replies. “Do you need me to have the vehicle pool send over a mule to drive you up there?”
“Negative,” I say. “I’ve been sitting on my ass long enough these last few days. I’m going to get into my armor and run up there on foot. It’s only ten klicks.”
“Yes, sir,” Corporal Keene says with just a hint of surprise on his face. Few troops choose to run twenty K in armor unless they are under orders or they have comrades to impress, no matter how tightly they roll the sleeves of their fatigues. But this afternoon, I want to move my legs and smell some caseless propellant, just as a reminder that I’m still a soldier and not a glorified personnel clerk. The data fields will be waiting for me when I get back from the range.
CHAPTER 3
SWEAT AND BULLETS
The path from the base to the live-fire range is a winding trail that hugs the topographic lines of the surrounding hills and mountains. The range is ten kilometers to the southwest, nestled in a valley with a steep hill as a solid backstop. We routinely use the range as a convenient halfway point for speed marches, and the trail is well defined after a year and a half of platoons and companies in battle armor treading it several times a week.
Unlike the PACS exoskeletons, regular battle armor doesn’t have a performance-boosting power assist. To save battery energy, the little servos in the armor only compensate for the added weight of the gear. I still have to do all the marching and running myself, and the hillsides here on the east coast of Iceland are steeper than they look from a distance. Five kilometers into my speed march, I am aching and sweaty, but I find that I enjoy the honest exertion. I’m all by myself, working my way along the flank of a hill, the ocean a steel-gray expanse to my left, sea blending with the gray skies far in the distance. The wind is cold and clean and strong enough to buffet me on occasion, even as I am weighed down with twenty kilos of armor and a seven-kilo rifle.