Lines of Departure

by Marko Kloos

  Floating in the dark, silent hull of our wrecked drop ship, there is no up or down. Without the chronometer of my helmet display, I wouldn’t be able to gauge the passage of time at all. I send out the same emergency broadcast every five minutes, but half an hour after the death of Banshee Two-Five, nobody has acknowledged our calls for help. My suit’s low-frequency data link to the fleet has stopped real-time updates, and my tactical display is showing only best-guess positions. Both our Linebackers are flashing emergency beacons, and the Hammerhead space control cruiser has disappeared from the plot entirely. The Manitoba has traveled beyond the range of my tactical map, along with the Lanky seed ship. We are alone in space above Sirius Ad.

  The cooling elements in my suit are working overtime to keep my body heat from boiling me in my armor. My air is good for another two and a half hours, and the battery pack will run the suit for another day or two before everything shuts down. I wonder if I should leave a last message in the memory banks of my armor’s tactical computer, one final good-bye to Mom and Halley maybe, but then I decide it would be pointless. Sirius Ad’s gravity will snare the wrecked drop ship sooner or later, and then we’ll burn up in the atmosphere. Some bits and pieces of us might survive, but even if we ever retake the Sirius A system, nobody’s going to mount a search for a few dog tags and some charred memory chips.

  Forty-five minutes after my initial call for help, another emergency beacon pops up on my screen, with a vector marking indicating that the ship in distress is far outside my display’s scope. Then the TacLink network connection drops altogether.

  “Well, shit.”

  “What’s the matter, Grayson?” the other sergeant wants to know.

  “We lost the Manitoba. Her crash buoy just popped up.”

  There are groans of despair from the other troops. The Manitoba didn’t make the Alcubierre chute in time. Nobody will know about our fate until our task force is overdue at Gateway and they send someone to look for us. Between the carrier and the three cruisers alone, we lost ten thousand people today, and another five thousand infantry grunts are trapped down in the dirt on Sirius Ad, waiting for their inevitable extermination by the new masters of the system. I have no idea how many civilians will be added to the total by the time the Lankies have finished the takeover, but it’s an old colony, settled half a century ago—a million or more settlers, third-generation off-Earthers at least.

  I’m twenty-six years old. For the last five years of my life, I have served the Commonwealth wherever they sent me. I have lost count of the number of people I’ve killed—directly, with my rifle, or indirectly, by calling down air strikes and close air support on them. I’ve ordered nuclear strikes on Lanky towns, and I’ve shot our own citizens, in the welfare riots back in my TA days. All of it has steered me toward this fate—to suffocate in the wrecked hull of a drop ship, high above a second-rate colony we never planned to keep anyway, or to end it all with a quick rifle shot.

  I think of Halley—the first time we met, on the first day of Basic, bunkmates by the luck of the alphabet—and I feel a profound gratitude for the interrupted, hectic, and strange relationship we’ve had, intense and exciting despite all the obstacles thrown into our path by an uncaring military. I think of Mom, and about the sadness she will feel at the loss of her only child, but I’m glad that we got to spend some time together just before I shipped out on this particular goat rope.

  I conclude that I have no regrets, and that I’d do it all again, in exactly the same fashion, if I had the choice. If my life was short, at least I managed to live the last part of it on my own terms.

  At the hour mark, when my air supply is down to a little over two hours, I turn up the transmitter again.

  “All fleet units, all fleet units. This is Tailpipe Five, on Banshee Two-Five. We are dead in space, and running out of oxygen. Anyone left out there, please acknowledge.”

  I don’t expect a reply, and when I hear a static-speckled voice responding to my distress call, I flinch so hard with excitement that I hit the back of my head on the hull behind my seat.

  “Tailpipe Five…Nassau. Copy one by five. Say position.”

  “Nassau, we are above Sirius Ad in a wrecked Wasp, and our suits are running dry. Sending nav data right now. Got anything you can send our way?”

  “Tailpipe Five, that’s a negative,” the reply comes after I have sent the burst transmission with our coordinates. “We are forty-five minutes from Alcubierre, and there’s a Lanky between us and you. Sorry,” the comms operator adds.

  The Nassau is the frigate escort of the minelayer that peeled off the task force right after our arrival in-system. She has her own drop ships, but if they’re less than an hour from the transition point, they are over four hours from our position. Even if they came about and headed our way at full acceleration, we’d be dead by the time they got here, and their captain is not going to go back where a carrier and three cruisers just met their end. I swallow my disappointment at having this new spark of hope extinguished.

  Then there’s a new voice on the emergency channel, clear and loud and impatient.

  “Nassau, belay that. Come about and prepare the flight deck for inbound traffic. This is the CAG, Manitoba.”

  I check my tactical display for the source of the new transmission, and see a formation of four drop ships climbing out of Sirius Ad’s atmosphere. The lead ship bears the designations CAG and CO 4/5 RGT—Commander Air Group and Commanding Officer, Fourth Regiment. The first boat in the formation has both the Manitoba’s air group commander and our infantry regiment’s commanding officer on board, two of the highest-ranking people in our task force. I want to hold my breath to stop any extraneous sounds, so I won’t miss a word of the new message traffic.

  “CAG Manitoba, Nassau. We are unable to reverse course. We’re forty-five minutes from transition.”

  “Nassau, CAG Manitoba. I see you on the plot, fella. Decelerate and loiter by the transition point. I have a four-ship flight stuffed with troops here. We can pick up Tailpipe Five and his entourage on the way, and catch up with you in four hours.”

  “Sir, there’s a Lanky seed ship on our tail, in case you aren’t up on current events.”

  “I can read a plot. The Lanky isn’t accelerating anymore. We can dogleg it around their position. Why am I even talking to you? Get me Nassau Actual, right fucking now.”

  There’s a ten-second silence in the channel, and a new voice comes on.

  “CAG, this is Nassau Actual.”

  “Lieutenant Colonel Carignan, I’d very much appreciate it if you’d decelerate and give us time to catch up.”

  “Pete, you’re asking me to risk my ship here. Did you see what happened to the Manitoba? I have no desire to add us to the casualty list.”

  “The Lanky is on a reverse course, and nowhere near you. Wait near the transition point, and if that seed ship moves in against you, get out and leave. Otherwise, let us try and sneak around the Lankies and over to you. I have a hundred people on these ships, and you’re the only unit left that can make Alcubierre.”

  The Nassau’s captain lets another ten seconds elapse before he responds to the request.

  “Colonel, I can’t do that. My first responsibility is my crew.”

  “Okay, then,” the CAG says, and his voice is flat with anger. “Let me rephrase that request. We have four Dragonflies here, and a total of sixteen standoff nukes between us. Do as I suggest and decelerate to wait for us, or I’ll launch every last fucking missile I have. They may not catch up with you in time, but that’s your bet to lose, mister. Those nukes do fifty gees sustained acceleration, and that old bucket of yours makes a fat target.”

  I can barely suppress a laugh into the shocked silence that follows the CAG’s threat. Colonel Barrett, the commander of the Manitoba’s air group, has a reputation for abrasiveness, and it seems that the prospect of being abandoned in a Lanky-controlled system has excised whatever sense of diplomacy he had. I have no idea if the CAG is me
rely bluffing, but I sincerely hope that he isn’t. The long-range standoff nukes on the Dragonflies are not really meant for antiship use, and the point defenses of a carrier would intercept them long before they got into range to do harm, but the Nassau is just an old frigate, and sixteen half-megaton warheads would saturate her point-defense system.

  “You’re threatening to shoot nukes at my ship? Are you out of your fucking mind? You know I’ll have you locked up and court-martialed,” the Nassau’s captain finally replies. He sounds every bit as pissed as the CAG now.

  “Yeah, we’ll worry about that shit later,” Colonel Barrett sends back.

  “You have four hours,” Nassau Actual says. “We’re decelerating. If you’re not in the docking clamp by then, we transition out. If the Lanky starts moving our way, we transition out without you. Understood?”

  “Good enough. CAG out.”

  Nassau’s captain does not bother to send a final end-of-transmission phrase.

  In the darkness of our shattered drop-ship hull, I let out an exuberant cheer.

  The flight of Dragonflies homes in on our dead Wasp, and the ten minutes of orbital maneuvering feel like ten hours to us. The Dragonfly drop ships have EVA airlocks for special ops, so we have a way into the ships without forcing their passengers to de-atmo the hulls. Still, without proper EVA suits, and with the last zero-gravity training session a few months behind me, changing ships in high orbit is a thrill I could do without. Under normal circumstances, the scene outside would be a breathtaking sight—the streamlined and lethal Dragonfly attack drop ship, position lights blinking, matching trajectories with our wreckage with the red and brown expanse of Sirius Ad below us as a backdrop. I mostly have eyes for the EVA hatch on the Dragonfly, a small target twenty yards beyond the destroyed tail ramp of our Wasp. When I push off, I miscalculate my trajectory and tumble toward the hatch too high, but the Dragonfly’s pilot fires his thrusters for a fraction of a second and expertly catches me with the hatch like a catcher plucking a ball out of the air with his mitt. A few moments later, the EVA hatch closes again, and I hear the rush of ingressing air as the crew pressurizes the hatch compartment again. The drop ships don’t have artificial-gravity gear like the big starships, so I have to hold on to the webbing that covers the inside of the hatch compartment to keep from careening around in the interior like a pea in a can.

  “Hang on for about twenty seconds, trooper,” someone says over the intercom. “I’ll open the troop hatch as soon as the pressure is back to normal.”

  “You got it,” I reply. “No rush.”

  In the weightlessness of high orbit, I can’t feel the acceleration of the ship directly, but when the pilot revs the engines again, the increased vibrations transmit from the hull right into the webbing I am grasping. On my tactical screen, I can see our four-ship diamond formation detaching from the symbol that marks the dead Banshee Two-Five, and then heading away from Sirius Ad at maximum acceleration. With nothing left between us and the distant Nassau but a four-hour flight and a Lanky seed ship to avoid along the way, I shut down my tactical screen. If we make our escape, I’ll owe my life to a drop-ship pilot for what seems like the fiftieth time, and if the Lankies intercept us, I don’t want to have a countdown to my impending death again.

  When we dock with the Nassau a few hours later, I expect to see a security detachment on the flight deck to escort us straight to the brig, but the Nassau’s captain seems to have decided to save the court-martial business for later. When we file out of the troop bay, our only welcoming committee is the chief of the deck, who waves us on impatiently. The Nassau’s little hangar is made to hold two combat-ready drop ships and two standby spares, and with four of the huge new Dragonflies cluttering up the deck, the ships are now parked wingtip to wingtip.

  “All hands, prepare for Alcubierre transition. I repeat, all hands prepare for Alcubierre transition. Countdown one-five minutes.”

  With almost a hundred new arrivals on the tiny frigate, the ship is now overstuffed with people and gear, and there are no seats for us to strap into. We sit down wherever we can claim a few square feet out of the way. I find a corner in a storage room, peel off my helmet, and sit down on the oil-stained floor to await our transition into the Alcubierre chute.

  When we transition for the trip back to our own solar system, we leave behind a carrier, a destroyer, and three cruisers, lost with all hands. On Sirius Ad, we abandon the better part of two full Spaceborne Infantry regiments, thousands of fellow troopers who aren’t geared to fight the Lankies that are about to descend upon them. Even if they evade the Lankies on the ground, every human being on that planet will succumb to the newly unbreathable atmosphere in another two months at the most. We pulled off a textbook planetary assault, won all our battles on the ground, and suffered the worst military defeat of NAC forces in half a decade—ten thousand dead in thirty minutes, another five thousand about to die, and the Lankies in possession of a system that is just seven light years and a single transition away from our homeworld.

  I have talked to hundreds of fleet Medical Corps shrinks after combat missions. We get a psych eval every time we come back from a drop with casualties, to make sure nobody’s going to snap and shoot up a mess hall or eat a rifle round. The psych hacks always ask the same questions, so they can get the answers that will let them make check marks in the right places on their eval forms. A lot of them are concerned about survivor guilt—the notion that we combat grunts beat ourselves up mentally for having survived battles that claimed our friends and comrades by the job lot. It’s all a bunch of horseshit, as far as I’m concerned.

  As we enter the chute, and the Alcubierre field around the ship makes every molecule in my body develop a low-level ache, the only guilt I feel is for being relieved at not being among the poor bastards on the ground, my comrades in arms who are now facing certain death at the hands of the Lankies. But I don’t feel any guilt for having escaped that fate, and I know that most of the troops we are leaving behind wouldn’t feel any guilt for surviving in my stead, either.

  CHAPTER 12

  If we were half as good at fighting Lankies as we are at wiping out each other, the fleet would assemble a huge task force and transition en masse to the Sirius A system, to kick the shit out of the Lankies and rescue all the troops we left behind. Instead, the only people jumping into instant action are the fleet’s pencil pushers.

  All through our transition from the Alcubierre chute back to Earth, the fleet brass tie up all our comms bandwidth to hold video debriefings with the survivors of Task Force Seventy-Two. I talk to an endless procession of majors, colonels, and generals, with a smattering of NAC and DOD officials in civilian garb thrown into the mix for good measure, and I repeat the same narrative dozens of times. Since I am the only surviving combat controller of the entire two-regiment force on the ground, the data storage modules in my battle armor are of particular interest to the brass, and they send a fleet Intel captain with an MP escort to collect my armor for data retrieval, as if I’m dumb enough to accidentally overwrite my computer’s memory with streamed Network news, or broadcast all the recorded plot data to everyone on the Nassau.

  After the third straight day of video debriefings, I do something I’ve never done before in my career—I duck out of duty by going to sick bay. It doesn’t take much to make the shrink put me on sedatives and sleeping pills, and I spend the last three days of our trip back to Earth pleasantly doped up on a semiprivate folding cot in Storage Locker 2204L.

  “Now hear this: All hands, prepare for arrival at Independence Station. ETA one hundred and twenty minutes.”

  “Independence Station?” Staff Sergeant West repeats. He looks at me with a raised eyebrow. “That’s the corporate civvie station. Wonder what’s wrong with old Gateway.”

  “Beats me,” I say, and take another sip of my coffee. “Maybe it finally fell into the North Atlantic. Every time we get back there, it looks more run down.”

  “You know the fleet.
They’ll run it ’til it breaks, and then they put it back together with polyglue and run it some more.”

  Sergeant West is one of the troopers who survived the demise of Banshee Two-Five with me. Over the last few days, we have spent a lot of time in the NCO galley, working through the events in the Sirius A system by talking about different things entirely, the roundabout combat-grunt way of dealing with mental trauma.

  The change in routine, combined with the fact that our in-system comms have been restricted ever since we popped out of Alcubierre a week ago, seems like a harbinger of bad things to come. When I share that concern with Sergeant West, he just shrugs.

  “You’ve been in long enough, Grayson. Never assume malice if you can explain it with lack of planning.”

  When we finally dock with Independence Station, we are greeted by a welcoming committee of what looks like a company or two of Intel officers and military police. More ominously, there are also people in civilian garb among them, and I don’t have to look at them twice to know they’re NAC domestic security agents. We’re funneled into separate rooms and split up into ever-smaller groups, until I find myself sitting in a small fabric-walled office unit with a dour-looking Intel captain.

  “Staff Sergeant Grayson,” he says, reading off the data pad in his hands. “Sorry about the Manitoba. I’m sure you’ve lost a lot of friends on that ship.”

  I didn’t really have a lot of friends on the Manitoba yet, since I had just transferred onto her, but I nod anyway.

  “That wasn’t the first ship you lost, I see. There was the Versailles back in 2113. Can’t get away from the Lankies, can you?”

  “Not my doing, Captain. I’d gladly stay away from them if they’d let me.”

  “Yeah, they’re getting annoying.” He flicks through the screen on his data pad with his forefinger. “You were on the surface when the seed ship arrived. Did you get the flash message traffic that ordered all ground units to stay put and go defensive?”