by Marko Kloos
BY MARKO KLOOS
Terms of Enlistment
Lines of Departure
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2014 Marko Kloos
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by 47North, Seattle
www.apub.com
ISBN-13: 9781477817407
ISBN-10: 1477817409
Cover illustration: Marc Simonetti
Cover Design: Sam Dawson
Library of Congress Number: 2013948462
For Lyra and Quinn. No matter how many novels I write, you two will always be my biggest accomplishment.
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1 REENLISTING
CHAPTER 2 NEW WALES
CHAPTER 3 NUCLEAR PEST CONTROL
CHAPTER 4 REASSIGNMENT
CHAPTER 5 GOING DOWN TO EARTH
CHAPTER 6 LIBERTY FALLS, VERMONT
CHAPTER 7 HALLEY
CHAPTER 8 MISSION BRIEFING
CHAPTER 9 COMBAT DROP
CHAPTER 10 THE BATTLE OF SIRIUS AD
CHAPTER 11 THE FATE OF THE TASK FORCE
CHAPTER 12 ON THE ROPES
CHAPTER 13 MIDWAY, DEPARTING
CHAPTER 14 A BRIEF REUNION
CHAPTER 15 REVELATIONS
CHAPTER 16 A CONFLICT OF AUTHORITY
CHAPTER 17 BASTILLE DAY
CHAPTER 18 HE WHO BLINKS FIRST
CHAPTER 19 BLUE ON BLUE
CHAPTER 20 THE BATTLE OF NEW SVALBARD
CHAPTER 21 A LOGISTICAL CONUNDRUM
CHAPTER 22 UNEXPECTED GUESTS
CHAPTER 23 A SCIENTIFIC APPROACH
CHAPTER 24 A SUPER-LONG SHOT
CHAPTER 25 OPERATION DOORKNOCKER
CHAPTER 26 PRESUMED HOSTILE
CHAPTER 27 UNPRECEDENTED EVENTS
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sometimes, the old sergeants talk about the Good Old Days.
There once was a blessed and mythical time when military service was a desirable job—a ticket to a low-risk career, access to decent food, and tolerable benefits. The military was selective, but when you got in, you were a member of a privileged class for the rest of your life.
Naturally, the Good Old Days came to an end about ten minutes after I signed my enlistment papers.
We’ve been fighting a new enemy for almost five years now, and we can’t even agree on a name for them. The xenobiologists came up with an unpronounceable Latin designation that nobody uses outside of a textbook. The infantry grunts, known for prosaicness, call them Lankies or Big Uglies. The Sino-Russians didn’t even have a name for them for the first year of the war, because they believed the North American Commonwealth was spinning tall tales to cover up terraforming disasters or natural calamities on the colonies we lost one by one.
Then the Lankies took SRA-settled Novaya Rossiya, just past the Thirty. One hundred thirty thousand dead colonists later, their scientists finally started to compare notes with ours.
These aliens are eighty feet tall and incredibly thick-skinned, and they roam around in groups. It takes heavy antiarmor munitions to put a dent in a Lanky, and their mile-high terraforming structures won’t budge for anything less than a ten-kiloton tactical nuke. The only way to scrape them off a colony planet is to glass all their atmo exchangers and settlements with a few hundred megatons from orbit, and that sort of treatment makes the place unfit for human resettlement. Once the Lanky seed ships enter the orbit of a colony, that place is no longer ours, one way or the other. To us, it may be a war—to them, it’s just pest control.
When I joined the military, humanity had a few hundred colonies between the SRA and the NAC, from the old settlement on Luna to the newly terraformed New Caledonia just short of the seventy-light-year line. Then the Lankies appeared and kicked us off a colony planet called Willoughby, and five years later we don’t have a single colony left beyond the thirty-light-year line that used to mark the boundary between the inner and outer colonies.
We’re down to sixty-nine colonies, and the number drops by a dozen or more every year. The Lankies show up, exterminate the big settlements, tear down our expensive terraforming stations, raise a fully functioning, superefficient terraforming network in less time than it takes us to send reinforcements through the nearest Alcubierre chute, and make the place their own. Once they’re in orbit, our people on the ground can only scatter and wait for the navy’s evac force to show up, because there’s not a damn thing the garrison marines can do against the Lankies.
When I was a kid, I used to watch the corny military adventure vids on the Networks. I remember the more optimistic ones, where Earth gets invaded by some species even more violent and territorial than our own, and the nations of Earth forget their old differences and stand shoulder to shoulder against the outside threat.
In reality, not even the threat of alien invasion of their colonies could keep the SRA from messing with us and sneaking around behind our backs to take advantage of the fact that three-quarters of our military strength was suddenly diverted to hold the line against the Lankies. On the fringes, we had to dig in to defend our colonies, using garrison battalions and regiments where we had companies and platoons before. On the inner colonies, we suddenly had to deal with increasingly bold SRA raids again, having to pry the Sino-Russians off of colonies that had been secure NAC property for over fifty years.
All in all, the last five years have been anything but low-risk for people in uniform.
Back home, the colony flights have stopped, which has made Earth an even more unpleasant place than it was when I joined up. These flights had two purposes: Relieve the population pressure back home, and give some sort of hope for a better future to everyone who didn’t have a ticket for the colonies yet. A slot on a colony ship was the ultimate lottery win, and as long as there was the chance of scoring one, the restless masses were not completely without prospects. Now even that remote chance is gone, and we have more welfare riots in a month than we used to have in a year. What’s worse, the perpetually cash-strapped government of the NAC is now well and truly broke.
Space colonization is a hideously expensive undertaking, and we lost trillions of dollars in equipment on the colonies the Lankies took away from us. There’s no more ore being mined on those worlds, no more raw materials coming in to offset the expense of colonization, and none of the private corporations are willing to extend loans or take on colony contracts anymore. To top it all off, the military was geared and organized to fight other militaries, and there’s no money left in the budget to refit ten marine divisions and five hundred starships to fight spacefaring eighty-foot creatures instead of Chinese or Russian marines.
Once upon a time, the military may have been a great career. Now we’re an overextended, underfunded, and unappreciated force. Behind us, we have the restless masses of our overpopulated homeworld, and in front of us, we have a new enemy who’s physically and technologically far above us. Only a nutcase would want to get into the service at this point, and you have to have a mental defect to want to stay in after your enlistment contract is up.
Naturally, when the time came for me to sign my name again or pack my things and become a civilian once more, I signed on the dotted line.
CHAPTER 1
“I solemnly swear and affirm to loyally serve the North American Commonwealth, and to bravely defend
its laws and the freedom of its citizens.”
I signed my reenlistment form yesterday in the captain’s office, so my butt is already public property for the next five years, but the military likes ritual. We’re in one of the briefing rooms, and the captain and XO are standing on either side of the briefing lectern. Someone dragged out a wrinkled North American Commonwealth flag and draped it over the wall display, and I have my hand in the air as I repeat the oath of service for the second time in my military career. A corporal from the fleet news service is recording the event for whatever reason. Even with our recent troubles, the military still has a 90 percent retention rate after the first term of enlistment, so a re-up ceremony isn’t exactly an uncommon event.
“Congratulations, Staff Sergeant Grayson,” the captain says after I complete the oath. “You’re back in the fold for another five years.”
What else was I going to do, anyway? I think.
“Thank you, sir,” I say, and take the entirely ceremonial reenlistment certificate from his outstretched hand. This means a bonus in my account, which has been growing steadily since my first day of Basic five years ago, but Commonwealth currency is becoming increasingly worthless. By the time I get out, the money in my government account will probably just be enough to pay for a breakfast and a train ride home to the welfare section of Boston.
I didn’t reenlist for the money, of course. I reenlisted because I didn’t know what the hell else to do. All my professional skills revolve around blowing things up or working classified neural-network systems, which makes me pretty much useless in the civilian world. I don’t much feel like going back to Earth and claiming a welfare apartment until I die early. I haven’t been back to Terra since the day I left Navy Indoc at Great Lakes for Fleet School on Luna, but from what I hear over the MilNet, the old homeworld isn’t doing so well. Some guys who have been there on leave recently say that the worst thing we could do to the Lankies would be to let them take the place.
Earth’s population crested at thirty billion people two years ago, and three billion of them are crammed into North America. Terra is an ant hive, teeming with hungry, discontented, and antisocial ants, and I have no desire to add to the population headcount. At least the military still feeds its people, which is more than can be said for the NAC’s civil administration. Mom makes it down to the civil building for net access once a month or so, and in her last message she mentioned that the Basic Nutritional Allowance has been cut to thirteen thousand calories per person per week. It looks like they’re running out of shit and soy down there.
I didn’t need to think very long about reenlisting, that’s for sure. Of course, my girlfriend Halley also reenlisted, so I really didn’t have much of a choice.
“So it’s done,” Halley says. The video feed is a bit grainy, but I have no problem seeing the dark rings under her eyes. She’s had a long day at Combat Flight School, teaching new pilots how to dodge Chinese portable surface-to-air missiles and Lanky bio-mines. We’re in the same system for a change—my ship is part of a task force that is practicing stealth insertions on one of Saturn’s many moons, and we can both tap into the orbital relay above Mars, which has enough spare bandwidth for a few minutes of vid chat.
“Yeah, it’s done. Had no choice, since you went ahead and just re-upped before me.”
“I thought we had decided we’d both sign again,” she says. “Remember? You crunched the numbers and said that both our bonuses were spare change at this point.”
“Yeah, I know. Just ribbin’ you. Having fun at Flight School?”
“Don’t get me started,” she says, rolling her eyes. “I can’t fucking wait to get back into the fleet. I mean, it’s nice not to be shot at for a few months, but I’d swear an oath that some of these rookies work for the other team. I’ve almost gotten killed three times this week alone.”
“Hey, you’re grooming the next batch of hero pilots. That’s important work.”
“Grooming the next batch of coffin liners,” she says darkly. “Our SRA friends have some new portable surface-to-air missile. Nuclear warhead in the fifty-microton range. Just enough to blot out a flight of drop ships without making a mess on the ground.”
“Shit,” I say. “Say what you want about the Lankies, but at least they don’t fuck around with nukes just yet.”
“They don’t need nukes, Andrew. They’re kicking our asses well enough without.”
Other than the ever-present risk of sudden and violent death, Halley has been the only constant in my life since we met in Basic Training Platoon 1066 back at NACRD Orem. We’ve managed to keep a sort of long-distance relationship going, months apart interspersed with short leaves spent together in run-down navy rec facilities, or on backwater colonies. We’ve both moved up in our respective career fields—she’s a first lieutenant in command of a brand-new top-of-the-line attack drop ship, and I’m in my second year as a combat controller after volunteering for what Halley called “the nutcase track.”
The job of a combat controller is to jump into the thick of the action with the frontline grunts on critical missions, but carrying a bunch of radios and a target designator instead of cutting-edge weaponry. It was a logical progression when I wanted to move up from Neural Networks, since I was already trained on all the fleet information systems. They were looking for volunteers, and I was looking for a more exciting job than watching progress bars in a Neural Networks control room. They got their volunteer, and I got excitement in spades.
I passed selection for the combat controller track, and spent almost the entire third year of my service term in training. In the meantime, Halley racked up two hundred combat missions, thousands of flight hours, and a Distinguished Flying Cross for some seriously insane flying while snatching a recon team from the embrace of a company of SRA marines in the middle of a hot-and-heavy firefight. We both think the other has the more dangerous job, and we’re both right, depending on the mission of the week.
“Going planetside again in a few days,” I tell Halley. Even through the secure comms link, I’m not supposed to give out operational details. The filtering software runs the connection on a three-second delay beyond the normal lag, to chop the feed if it detects that I’m talking about planets, ship names, or star systems.
“Lankies or SRA?” she asks.
“Lankies. I’m dropping in with a recon team. We’re going to look for something worth dropping a few kilotons on.”
“Just a team? That’s not a lot of guns.”
“Well, the idea is to avoid them if we can. Besides, I’m going in with Recon. I’ll be fine.”
“Yeah, well, even recon guys die,” Halley says. “I’ve showed up at more than one scheduled pickup without anyone there because the whole team got greased.”
“If we run into trouble, I’ll let Recon do the shooting while I run the other way. I’m just a walking radio farm.”
“For being complete shit magnets, we’re actually pretty lucky, you know?” Halley muses, and we both laugh.
“You have a weird definition of ‘lucky,’” I say, but I know she’s right. We’re doing some of the most dangerous work in the Fleet Arm, and we’ve managed to survive almost four years of combat deployments without any serious scrapes. We only had twelve graduates in our platoon at the end of Basic Training, and four of them have died in combat. Strangely enough, all the members of our chow-hall table are still alive, and I’m the only member of our little group who managed to get hurt enough for a Purple Heart. Halley’s Distinguished Flying Cross makes her the most highly decorated of us, and since she was the only graduate of our platoon to snatch an officer-track slot, she’s also the highest-ranking member of Chow Hall Table 5.
“Well, we’ve made it this far,” Halley says, as if she just had the same thoughts. “What’s another five years of dodging ground fire?”
“Hey, it could be worse,” I reply. “We could be back on Earth right now.”
My current ship is the NACS Intrepid, fleet carrier
and one of three ships of the new Essex class. The Essex carriers are fast, well armed, and the last new hardware in the fleet for the foreseeable future. The ships were ordered before the war with the Lankies broke out, and they hurriedly specified some refits to accommodate the new tactical situation before the three ships of the class were even out of the construction dock. The navy had ordered seven more, ten ships in total to form the new backbone of the NAC carrier force, but then they ran out of money, so the three Essex carriers form a rather short backbone. They’re not nearly as big as the Navigator-class supercarriers that preceded them, but they’re faster and fitted with a better sensor suite, which has proven a bigger asset against the Lankies than sheer size or armor-belt thickness. The Essex carriers are always in demand, and always in the thick of things.
I like serving on a carrier, because the big bird farms have a lot more space than the little tin cans I usually pulled when I was still a Neural Networks administrator. As one of three combat controllers on the Intrepid, I get my own single-person berth, a luxury usually reserved for senior NCOs and staff officers. That means I get to vid-chat in private, without a bunch of my peers half-listening over my shoulder. Combat controllers are always in demand as well, since there are so few of us, and we get certain privileges above our rank and pay grade. The entire fleet only has two hundred of us, so we never have much idle time.
Since graduating from the pipeline and putting on the scarlet beret, I’ve been hopping from one star system to the next, fighting the SRA one month and the Lankies the next. If the fleet paid a cent for every million miles traveled, I’d be the richest individual in the history of the planet. Because Fleet Arm ships need downtime for refits and rearming, I tend to hop ships every six months or so, because we combat controllers are too few to go around to have as much downtime as the hardware. Before the Intrepid, I was on the Atlas, the Tecumseh, the New Hampshire, and a half dozen other ships whose names I can’t even recall without consulting my personnel and transfer record.