Orders of Battle (Frontlines)

by Marko Kloos

  “It’s working. I think. Everything looks the way it should. I’m getting a good signal on the positioning system fix. We’re triangulating off three different pulsars. But the readout is nonsense. Maybe something got fried when the systems got bumped off-line.”

  “Show me that nonsense readout, please.” Lieutenant Colonel Campbell strides over to the astrogation station and leans in to look at the screens.

  “What the fuck.”

  “I’ll run a systems check and have them recalibrate the hardware, ma’am.”

  The XO looks over at Colonel Drake.

  “If you thought our day has been interesting so far, you’re in for a laugh, Skipper.”

  “Don’t keep me in suspense,” the commander says.

  Lieutenant Colonel Campbell looks around the CIC, and for the first time since I’ve come aboard, I can see something like worry in her face. She reaches down and punches a succession of data fields. On the holotable, the tactical display disappears, and a galactic star chart expands in its stead.

  “The galactic positioning system claims we are here,” the XO says. A tiny blue lozenge-shaped marker appears on the star chart and starts blinking slowly, looking forlorn in the vast sea of constellations all around it. She increases the scale of the display, and I feel a surge of despair when I see just how far the map has to zoom out before the nearest star system shows up.

  “If this is right, we’re in the middle of nowhere, on the ass end of the Corvus constellation. Nine hundred light-years from Earth.”

  CHAPTER 22

  A LONG WAY FROM ANYTHING

  “What’s the likelihood that the system is wrong?” Colonel Drake asks. He’s standing at the astrogation station with the XO, hemming in an increasingly unhappy-looking Lieutenant Cole. “Maybe the mapping data is off. Nobody has been nine hundred light-years out yet.”

  “We get a wrong fix sometimes, but the software always corrects it in a few seconds,” Lieutenant Cole says. “This one hasn’t jumped its spot since it came back on.”

  “What about the signal?” I ask. “Could someone be messing with it?”

  Lieutenant Cole shakes his head. “It’s the Galactic Positioning System, right? It triangulates off the known pulsars and their magnetic time signatures. You can’t spoof it or jam it. You either get the signal or you don’t.”

  “We can’t spoof it,” the XO says. “Doesn’t mean the Lankies can’t.”

  “That’s a bit of a stretch. They didn’t know we were going to come out of Alcubierre right here any more than we did. And there’s no way our ride could have sent a message ahead from inside the bubble.” Colonel Drake shakes his head.

  “Occam’s razor,” he continues. “Assume that we are where the GPS says we are.”

  “Then we have a bit of a problem.” Lieutenant Colonel Campbell crosses her arms in front of her chest and walks over to the holotable.

  “If we’re really in an empty corner of the Corvus constellation, we’re a very long way from any colony system. A long way from anything. Nothing we can reach with a fusion drive in our lifetimes. The nearest star system is nineteen light-years away. That would take two hundred years even if we had enough fuel to get this crate up to ten percent of light speed. Not that the food and water on this ship will last us even two years.”

  “Let’s not go down that route,” the commander says in a cautioning voice. “I find it hard to believe that the Lankies put their nodes into random galactic dead ends. Whatever this one was running toward, he thought it was safety.”

  He looks around the CIC.

  “Nobody, and I mean nobody, carries rumors and doomsaying out of this room. This information is restricted to CIC personnel right now. Until we have verified our situation and the enemy disposition in the neighborhood, there will be no talking about where we may be or what may have happened. This is still a fully operational NAC warship with a mission. It will cease to be that if the crew starts to panic and lose their minds.”

  Colonel Drake looks at the XO.

  “Get on the 1MC and make an all-hands announcement that we’ve had a malfunction of the Alcubierre system, but that we’re undamaged and back to normal. Call everyone down from combat stations and resume the watch cycle. Get me a passive sensor sweep of the area and launch the recon drones for a survey run. That Lanky didn’t just run toward nothing. Let’s find out what’s out here before we start bumbling around and calling attention to ourselves with EM noise.” He claps his hands sharply.

  “Let’s get to work, people. We ended up here somehow. We’ll figure out how to get back somehow. If there’s an Alcubierre entry point, there must be an outbound node somewhere as well. I have absolutely no interest in pointing this ship Earthward and going the long way.”

  That would be a wonderful last fuck-you from the Lanky ship, I think as I lean against the command pit railing and look at the situational display that has replaced the star chart again. Drag us out into the middle of nowhere to a place from which we can’t escape.

  I unbuckle my harness and get out of my chair again. Then I walk over to the commander, who is standing in the holotable pit with the XO. Whenever we aren’t running an active STT mission, I already feel like the fifth wheel in the CIC most of the time, but now the feeling is amplified as everyone in the room except me can focus on a job.

  “Something on your mind, Major?” Colonel Drake says when I step down into the pit to join them.

  “There’s nothing I can do from the CIC right now, sir. And quite frankly, all this sitting around is making me a bit jumpy. With your permission, I want to check on my team members and at least brief the section leaders.”

  Colonel Drake runs a hand through his hair and scratches the back of his head.

  “I would prefer if you held off on specifics until we know exactly what our situation is out here,” he says. “Check on your team but give them the same general line for now. Even your section leaders. You know how quickly the rumor mill can churn.”

  “I think the rumor mill is churning already anyway, sir. We won’t be able to keep a lid on this for long. Not if we don’t want to have to put out a hundred different bush fires. You know how grunts are.”

  “The recon drones are going to launch in a few minutes and do a surveillance of the neighborhood. We don’t need to keep a lid on this forever. Just for a few hours. Until we have data we can act on. If you don’t think you can do that, I’d prefer if you remained in the CIC, Major. But I have to tell you that you look ripe for a shower and a few hours of sleep.”

  “I’m not sure I could sleep if I tried, sir. Not after all of this.”

  “I’m ordering you to try anyway. Get some no-go pills from the druids down in medical if you must. You’ve been on your feet for too long. I could see you nodding off at the TacOps station while we were in Alcubierre. Go rinse off and put your head on a pillow. I don’t want to see you in the CIC again for at least six hours unless there’s a general quarters alarm. We won’t be running any ground ops anytime soon anyway. No ground to go to right now. And make sure the SEAL team has some enforced downtime as well. Might as well let them get rest while they can.”

  “Aye, sir,” I say with some reluctance.

  When I get down to Grunt Country ten minutes later, my section leaders are already in the STT briefing room, obeying the summons I sent through my data pad before I left the CIC.

  “No offense, sir, but you look like you’ve had a rough day,” Captain Burns says.

  “You could say that,” I concede. “Harper, how’s your section doing?”

  “All is well, Major. I’m a little shocked we got out of there without any casualties. But nobody stubbed so much as a toe.”

  I pick one of the empty seats and drop into it with a little grunt. My body feels like someone turned up the artificial gravity since I stepped out of the CIC. I know I’ve done much more strenuous missions before, and I’ve been awake for far longer periods at a stretch, but right now I feel more tired t
han I’ve ever felt in my life.

  “What’s the word from upstairs, sir?”

  My four section leaders look at me expectantly. They’re all roughly my age or just a little younger, and once again it strikes me as strange that these men look to me for guidance and leadership, that I am someone from “upstairs” now.

  “You’ve heard the XO,” I say. “Not much to add. Our Alcubierre system had a malfunction.”

  “A malfunction,” Captain Taylor repeats.

  “There has to be a little bit more than that,” Captain Lawson says.

  I let out a slow breath while I decide how much I can tell my team without disobeying the commander’s order directly.

  They all have command bullshit experience, I decide. They can read between the lines.

  “The navigation system went all wonky,” I say. “We don’t know where we are right now. The skipper is sending out the battlespace control squadron to get the picture. Until they get word back to us, we’re kind of floating in the dark. But that info stays just on this level.”

  I can tell by the looks my captains are exchanging that they all know I am withholding something, but I also know that they’ll pretend to accept the information at face value, at least in front of me. We’re only one rank apart, but the layer between company and field-grade officer is an opaque one, and there is a mental distance between us that no amount of familiarity will be able to bridge. They are closer to their NCOs and junior officers, and I am closer to the upper command echelons, and that’s the way it has always been. I am no longer a small unit leader. I am someone who takes orders from the command level and withholds information from his subordinates when it’s necessary for the mission. The thought makes me feel unclean somehow.

  “That’s all I can tell you right now. The CO will update everyone over the 1MC once we know just what the hell is going on. Until then, that’s all the info I can give you.”

  I get out of my chair again. It takes so much effort that I’m sorry I sat down in the first place instead of doing this short update while standing at the front of the room.

  “Harper, make sure that the SEALs all get some shut-eye and a good stretch of downtime. Orders from the skipper. They probably won’t need us for a little while.”

  “Aye, sir. I’ll order them into their racks if they aren’t there already. Any idea for a time frame?”

  “The skipper says the recon birds will need a few hours to get the picture. I would guess we should be safe for a watch cycle or two.”

  “Copy that. And if you don’t mind me saying—”

  “I know,” I cut him off. “I don’t look too fresh, either. I am heading for my own bunk as soon as we are done here. Check on your squad leaders, everyone. Make sure they’re squared away and that the troops have everything they need. And you may all want to take the opportunity to get some downtime yourselves. You know the golden rule in the field.”

  “Never miss an opportunity to grab chow or sleep,” Captain Lawson recites dutifully. “You never know when it will come your way again.”

  “Damn straight. Now carry on, and I’ll let you know when I have more intel to share,” I say.

  I watch my four captains file out of the room, and I feel a sudden pang of envy that they’ll be able to take one last rest without knowing the severity of the situation, without being kept awake by the knowledge that we are nine hundred light-years from home with no obvious way to get back. And not for the first time, I find myself thinking that accepting a command rank was the worst decision of my career, and maybe my entire life.

  Back in my quarters, I take a long shower, overriding the water rationer five times to keep the hot water coming even though I know that we are far away from resupply now. The water is continuously recycled anyway, and it won’t be the essential thing that runs out first if we don’t find a way out of this place.

  When I have dried off and put on a fresh set of fatigues, I sit down at my cabin’s tiny office workstation and turn on my terminal screen. I scroll through my list of messages and feel a desperate sense of longing when I see Halley’s sender ID on some of them. But they are older missives, of course, received when we were still in the solar system and in range of the MilNet relays. I’ve already read them several times over, but with nothing else to do and no other link to my wife at the moment, I read them again, keenly aware that they may be the last words from her I’ll ever get to see. But if I was hoping for comfort, seeing our last exchanges intensifies the low-level dread I already feel, and I close the message window and return to my personal landing screen. There’s an inconceivable gulf of space between us now, a distance so wide that if the ship sent an emergency signal to Earth at this moment, it would take almost a millennium to reach our home planet, fifty generations of human life spans. Even if the Earth is still around in 3020 and we have any descendants on it, they won’t be able to relate to our messages any more than we could relate to handwritten notes from some of our ancestors living in 1120. We’d be no more than archaeological curiosities, historical artifacts. Halley will never know what happened to me, and any far-distant relatives down the time stream won’t care.

  We had our chance to quit, I think. We should have taken it. Now we’ll both get to pay the price.

  It’s pointless and futile because the data banks of this ship may never synchronize with the MilNet again. But I bring up a new message window anyway and address it to Halley’s node. Even if she will never see the sentiment, I don’t want my last recorded message to her to be some insubstantial bantering about leave schedules, so I write a new one.

  >Still kicking. Still love you. Always have. Always will.

  It violates our unspoken rule that we never use those words unless we are face-to-face, but I think that she would forgive me the transgression considering the circumstances.

  I send the message into the outbound queue. Then I shut down the terminal and go to my bunk, where I lie down fully clothed, expecting to drift off a little at best until the next change-of-watch alert sounds.

  Instead, I fall asleep almost right away. And despite the events of the last day and a half, my sleep is deep and dreamless.

  CHAPTER 23

  NEEDLES AND HAYSTACKS

  “Now hear this. All command-level officers, report to the flag briefing room at 0800 Zulu. I repeat, all command-level officers report to the flag briefing room at 0800 Zulu.”

  The 1MC announcement stirs me out of my sleep. I sit up and look around in my darkened quarters until I locate the time projection on the bulkhead. It’s 0730 shipboard time, and I’ve slept for almost nine hours and through a change of watch. When I reach for my fatigues, I realize that I am already wearing them because I went to bed in my clothes.

  I turn on the light and walk into the little wet cell. The face that looks back at me in the mirror seems too pale and tired to belong to me. I don’t know if someone can run out of steam for good, if one event can sap a person of all their remaining vitality and energy, but right now it feels I am almost at that point, if it exists.

  On the way to the flag briefing room, I feel my stomach growling, and I realize that I haven’t had any food since before I went on the surface mission to Willoughby City. With fifteen minutes to the briefing, I don’t have the time to stop by the officers’ mess and have a proper meal, so I grab a leftover sandwich from last night’s watch-change buffet and eat it in a hurry while I rush up the stairs to the decks above, violating officer decorum in the act.

  “You’re looking better, Major,” Colonel Drake says when I walk into the room. “I’m glad you followed my advice.”

  “I didn’t take it as advice, sir,” I say.

  “Good answer. Have a seat.”

  I take my place in my usual spot, next to Lieutenant Colonel Campbell and across the table from Colonels Pace and Rigney. When I am seated, Colonel Drake gets up and walks over to the door to close and seal it. Then he returns to the table and remains standing at the end of it. He punches a few d
ata fields on the surface and activates the viewscreen at the front of the room.

  “Major Grayson was present in the CIC when we came out of Alcubierre, so he already knows what I told Colonel Pace and Colonel Rigney in the ready room last night. Astrogation has verified that the GPS reading is accurate. We got dragged into a thirty-three-minute Alcubierre trip by the Lanky seed ship, and we ended up nine hundred light-years away from Earth. We are currently in deep space on the outer edge of the Corvus constellation, far away from any star systems.”

  The viewscreen shows a star chart of the area, encompassing the closest systems and pinpointing our relative position. When I last saw the same chart in the CIC, it was empty except for the icon representing Washington. Now there are several other objects nearby.

  “We’ve deployed the recon drones for a passive sensor sweep of the neighborhood,” Colonel Drake continues. “And while the nearest star system is nineteen light-years away, it seems like the Lanky ship wasn’t just picking this place at random. There’s a planet out there, five hundred million kilometers from our current position. The drones spotted it on infrared.”

  “Out here,” Colonel Pace says. “A planet. Without any stars nearby.”

  “A rogue planet,” the XO says. “It’s not orbiting a star. It’s orbiting the galactic center instead. From what my astronomy teacher said, the galaxy is full of ’em.”

  “It’s about the size of Earth, give or take ten percent,” Colonel Drake continues. “We’ve redeployed the drones to cover as much of the space between here and there as possible.”

  Colonel Rigney leans back in his chair and folds his arms across his barrel chest. “I have a concern. There are a thousand troops down in Grunt Country that do nothing right now but consume calories. Three thousand per day, per head. Unless we find a moon or a planet nearby where we can farm some protein and carbohydrates, we’re going to be in deep shit once the food stocks are gone.”