by Marko Kloos
If we launch in the next few days and haul ass back to the Sirius A chute at maximum acceleration, we can make it back just in time to get our people out before the Lanky terraforming turns the place into a toxic pressure cooker. If we would only join forces with the SRA for once instead of fighting over the leftovers, we could even kick the Lankies off that rock and save what’s left of the civvie population.
I remember the faces of the podheads that dropped with me on that mission. I wonder if Macfee, my fellow combat controller, survived the initial Lanky onslaught, and if he’s hiding out with an SI squad somewhere on Sirius Ad, waiting for the rescue ships he already knows won’t come in time.
“If that’s not where we’re going, I’m going to look at alternative employment,” I say.
Captain Michaelson looks out over the mess that is the hangar deck, his expression unreadable. “If that’s not where we’re going, we should start loading flag officers into those missile tubes,” he replies.
He looks at me and smiles curtly, as if he had just realized that he shouldn’t have voiced that thought in the presence of a noncom.
“God knows they’re dense enough. Shoot a pod full of generals into a Lanky ship, you might actually do some decent damage. Sure as shit won’t be a loss to us either way.”
We get our first look at the tenants of Tent City at lunch, when we sit in the crowded NCO mess near the flight deck. I’m sitting with my back to the hatch, and when I hear a sudden increase in conversation buzz behind me, I turn around to see a group of troopers stepping into the room. They’re all wearing standard NAC camo fatigues, but the berets tucked underneath their shoulder boards aren’t fleet black or SI maroon. Instead, they’re a subdued shade of green.
“Homeworld Defense? What the fuck are they doing here?”
The new arrivals look around with that particular expression of subdued anxiety that’s exclusive to grunts in a new and unknown environment. They spot the back of the chow line and walk over to claim their spots. Except for the color of their berets, they are every bit as hard-edged and lean as our SI troopers.
“You have got to be kidding me,” Sergeant Simer says next to me. “I’ve never seen any HD on a fleet ship, not in five years of service.”
“I haven’t, either.”
“Looks like we’re really down to the dregs this time, eh?”
“Hey.” I shoot him an unfriendly look, and Simer raises an eyebrow. “Can the shit talk, Simer. I was HD before I joined the fleet.”
“No kidding?”
“No kidding. Back when it was still the Territorial Army, before all the unified service bullshit.”
The newcomers are keenly aware of the fact that most of the people in the room are staring at them, but they ignore the attention. After a minute or so, the novelty has worn off, and the noise level in the room returns to its regular mealtime volume.
I eat my lunch while half-listening to the conversations around me, and keep an eye on the HD troopers that end up clustering at a table near the hatch. When they get up to stow their meal trays, I do the same and head for the hatch at the same time.
I loiter in the hallway outside until the HD sergeants come out of the mess room. They walk down the corridor in small groups, still looking out of place and unsure, like kids in a new school on the first day. The last HD trooper out of the hatch is a sergeant, one rank below me, but close enough to negate rank etiquette. I fall in beside him as he walks off to follow his comrades.
“Sergeant, wait up.”
He gives me a reserved smile.
“Staff Sergeant.”
“What’s Homeworld Defense doing up here in space? I thought you guys don’t do hard vacuum.”
“I guess we do now,” he shrugs.
“Andrew Grayson,” I say, and offer my hand. “I was TA for a few months, back when I joined. 365th AIB, out of Dayton.”
“No shit?” He shakes my hand. “John Murphy. I’ve never heard of a TA grunt going fleet.”
“Yeah, it hardly ever happens. I was lucky. Or unlucky, depending on your point of view.”
He looks at my chest pockets, the cursory glance of the military man checking out someone else’s cloth patch credentials, and his gaze lingers for just a moment on my Master-level combat-drop badge, identical to the one he’s wearing.
“365th, huh? They’re still around. We did a drop with them a few months back. We’re the 309th, out of Nashville.”
“You guys run out of shit to do down there?”
“Hardly.” Sergeant Murphy lets out a brief snort. “We do three drops a week inside the periphery these days. You wouldn’t think those welfare shits had anything left to burn in there, but it’s a fucking war zone every ration day.”
“I dropped into Detroit with the 365th once. Five years of combat drops on the colonies since then, Lankies and all, and I’ve never been as scared as I was that night. Almost had my tag punched, too.”
“Detroit,” he says. “Boy, that’s the master shithole right there. What happened?”
“Squad got chewed up bad. I got stitched with an M-66, two of our guys bought it, and the sarge lost her leg.”
“Who was your squad sergeant?”
“Staff Sergeant Fallon. She made SFC just after. She’s probably a twenty-chevron sergeant major by now. Do you know her?”
He chuckles in reply. “Everybody knows Master Sergeant Fallon. She’s a freakin’ legend.”
He taps the unit patch on his sleeve with his index finger.
“We’re the advance logistics team for the 309th. The other battalion shipping out with us is the 330th, out of Knoxville. Master Sergeant Fallon is the main ass-kicker in the 330th.”
I don’t have much to do except to stow my kit and exercise, so I spend most of my time on the flight deck, working out while keeping an eye on the shuttles that are delivering personnel and gear every few minutes.
The HD troops start arriving in force in the afternoon. The docking clamps haul up shuttle after shuttle loaded with troopers in battle armor, hauling gear bags. From the other side of the hangar deck, I can’t make out individual faces, and all the HD grunts look alike in their bulky armor suits, but when Sergeant Fallon’s shuttle arrives, I have no trouble making her out in the crowd. Shortly before the late afternoon watch change, the docking arm deposits a weather-beaten fleet shuttle on the deck, the main hatch opens, and a group of HD troopers step out on the flight deck as if they are deploying in the middle of a hostile city. They have their rifles slung across their chests, and there are no magazines in their weapons, but the disembarking HD troopers still radiate a tense readiness.
I recognize Sergeant Fallon instantly. She walks down the ramp with the efficiency of movement I remember well. There’s nothing casual about her stride. She walks onto the Midway’s flight deck like a predator checking out a new environment. I know that her left leg underneath the battle armor is titanium alloy and nanocarbon fibers instead of flesh and bone, but there’s no way to deduce it from her gait. As she steps off the ramp and toward her unit’s assembly area on the other side of the black-and-yellow safety line, there’s a phalanx of her troopers around her—not bodyguards, but limbs of the same belligerent organism, ready to strike out in any direction if needed.
I watch as her group gathers in a circle for a quick briefing and then moves over to their assigned area, where they start to make this unfamiliar territory their own, safety and comfort in numbers.
I haven’t seen Sergeant Fallon since I left the TA four and a half years ago, and we have only exchanged a few dozen MilNet messages since then. Still, the knowledge of her presence on board puts my mind at ease a little. As we prepare to leave Gateway for God knows where, doing God knows what, it’s comforting to know at least one other person on this ship. Having my old squad leader nearby makes me feel a little less alone in the universe right now.
CHAPTER 14
“Now hear this: All hands, prepare for departure. Repeat, all hands prepare for
departure. Secure all docking collars.”
I’m back in the supply group picking up my new-issue gear when the departure alert comes over the 1MC. With all the activity everywhere on the ship, it seems impossible that the Midway is already stocked and crewed for combat operations, but it looks like we’re off to war anyway.
“Already?” Sergeant Simer says, echoing my own thoughts. “Jeez. It’s like they’re pushing us out the door with our shoes untied.”
“And in our underwear,” I add. “No way this bucket is already in fighting shape.”
“You got quarters yet, Grayson?”
“Yeah, I grabbed a berth in NCO country. Weird—they’re stacking the grunts three high on the flight deck, and half the permanent berths on my deck are empty. I got a two-man berth all to myself. It’s like we’re running on a skeleton crew.”
“We are,” Simer says. “Sixty percent of normal, at best.”
“But we have three times as many grunts as a supercarrier. And most of them are garrison troops who have never been in space before.”
“We gotta feed all those mudlegs for a month, we’ll get to wherever we’re headed with empty food stores,” Simer says. “Hope it’s a fast trip to the chute.”
By now, everyone but the most oblivious private straight out of tech school has figured out that our upcoming deployment is going to be anything but a bread-and-butter task force cruise or planetary assault. They never inform the rank and file of the mission specifics until we are out of the Alcubierre chute in the destination system, so all we can do is speculate. Since we have three times our normal contingent of infantry, and not enough drop ships to land them all at once, the general consensus in the NCO mess is a garrison deployment, reinforcing some SI detachment on a backwater colony planet close to the Thirty. The presence of Homeworld Defense troops and the aged equipment of our hastily assembled battle group spawn other rumors, magnitudes wilder than the usual pre-deployment scuttlebutt: We’re evacuating Earth. We’re assaulting the Lanky homeworld with everything that can ride an Alcubierre chute. We secretly made peace with the SRA, and we’re going to help them fight off the Lankies on Novaya Kiev. We secretly surrendered to the SRA, and we’re delivering half the fleet’s tonnage for disarmament. Enlisted soldiers have active imaginations, unlike the brass at Joint Command, or the bureaucrats holding the reins back on Earth.
Whatever the rumors, however, the conclusions are similar in every mess hall and crew berth on the ship. This deployment will be a hasty clusterfuck of epic proportions, and at the end of the day, the grunts and pilots and wrench spinners will be left holding the bag.
I finally run into my old squad leader in the most fitting of all places on the Midway—the shooting range over in SI country.
Since I lost all my kit with the Manitoba, the armorer on the Midway had to scrounge up a pair of armament sets for me. Ever since they gave us new gear for use against the Lankies, every spaceborne grunt has two sets of weapons, called Alpha and Bravo kit. The Alpha kit consists of a modular fléchette rifle with a grenade launcher, for use against other humans. The Bravo kit is centered on the M-80, a giant jackhammer of a rifle that fires a twenty-five millimeter round with the destructive power of a light-vehicle cannon.
The Alpha and Bravo kits I get from the armorer are from the tail end of the supply chain, just like everything else on this ship. The M-66 looks like it has been cleaned to death by fifty cycles of recruits, and the M-80 is so loose and rattly that I suspect it was used for stress-testing experimental loads at Aberdeen Proving Grounds. Still, I want to be sure that my new rifles actually hit roughly where I point them, so I haul the entire kit down to the range on a slow morning.
When I check in with the range master, I can see through the armored windows that all eight of the computerized shooting stations are taken up by HD troopers, and more grunts are lined up and waiting behind each station. The troopers in the firing lanes are putting their fléchette rifles through their paces, shooting bursts at computer-generated targets. All the HD troopers on the range carry their standard M-66s, which are almost useless against thousand-ton Lankies that can cover forty klicks in an hour at a leisurely gait.
It’s strange to see the Homeworld Defense troops in their unfamiliar battle armor on fleet turf. The HD armor suits are subtly different from those worn by our Spaceborne Infantry grunts. Their shoulder pauldrons are bigger, the chest and back plates are more faceted, and the sensor bulbs on the helmets are in slightly different spots. I notice that most of the grunts on the firing line have battle scars on their armor plating, shrapnel gouges and pockmarks from bullet impacts. Whatever the HD battalions riding along with us have done Earthside lately, it looks like they were no less busy than our frontline assault regiments.
The HD troops use helmet-mounted sights, just like we do, so all the troopers on the firing line are in full battle rattle. They wear name tags across the backs of their helmets, but I don’t need to read the one labeled FALLON to recognize my old squad sergeant. She’s in the last lane on the far right of the line, standing half a head shorter than the next smallest of her troopers. The rifle in her hands burps out a steady stream of short bursts. There’s something about her bearing and economy of movement that would make her stand out in a parade ground among a whole regiment of troopers. I watch as she works through her magazine, putting simulated tungsten fléchettes into imaginary holographic enemies until the bolt of her rifle locks back on an empty feedway. She raises the muzzle, yanks the disposable magazine block out of the rifle, and checks the chamber before vacating her spot in the booth for the next trooper in line. Then she walks up the firing line to the exit hatch where I am standing, and I give her a curt wave when she raises the visor of her battle helmet. Her purposeful stride falters just for a fraction of a second, and I see a hint of surprise on the part of her face I can see through the visor slot of her helmet. Then she walks over to where I’m standing and motions for me to follow her out through the armored hatch of the firing range, away from the hoarse staccato of the fléchette rifles.
Outside, in the range master’s vestibule, she removes her helmet and turns around to face me.
“Andrew Grayson,” she says, and pulls me into a firm one-armed hug. Nearby, two of the HD troopers about to walk onto the range exchange looks of surprised amusement at the sight of their senior sergeant hugging some fleet puke. “What the fuck are you doing on this rusty piece of shit?”
“Good to see you again, Sarge,” I say. “This rusty piece of shit is my new duty station as of last week.”
“You must have pissed off the brass something fierce again.”
“No, my shiny new ship got shot to shit by the Lankies a few weeks ago. But what the hell are you doing here? I thought you didn’t do space.”
“Yeah, well, so did I. Division says we’re on loan, so we pack our shit and go. Trust me, I’m not ecstatic about it.”
I haven’t seen Sergeant Fallon in person since my last day with the Territorial Army, half a lifetime ago. She hasn’t changed much at all. Her hair is neatly gathered into the same tight ponytail I remember, and her features are still hard and sharp. From her service history, I know Briana Fallon is about ten years older than I am, but I never asked her exact age, and she never volunteered it. I could no more guess her year of birth than estimate the manufacturing date of a well-serviced drop ship. A weapon maintained at peak efficiency is all but ageless. The only obvious difference between this Sergeant Fallon and the one who led my squad into Detroit five years ago is the rank device on the chest of her battle armor. She has gained two ranks since then, and now wears the triple chevrons of a master sergeant.
She taps the single chevron of my staff sergeant rank sigil with the finger of her armored glove.
“Climbed the ladder a bit, huh?”
“Yeah. You know the fleet. They give those things to everyone.”
“You did good,” she says, and nods at the combat controller flash on my helmet. “I’m glad
you didn’t stick with that console jockey job Unwerth shoved you into.”
“They never have enough nutcases for the suicide track. Whatever happened to Major Unwerth?”
Sergeant Fallon shakes her head with a disgusted snort.
“Major Unwerth is now Lieutenant Colonel Unwerth. He’s the new XO of the 365th. Place ain’t what it used to be, I tell you that.”
“How come you switched units, Sarge?”
“Had no choice, Grayson.” She lowers her voice a little. “The 330th is a penal battalion of sorts. It took a mauling in the New Madrid riots last year, so they dissolved it and rebuilt it with all the misfits and malcontents the brigade wanted to dump. Keeps us all in one place, you see.”
She looks around to check if anyone is close enough to listen in, but the range master is on the other side of the range door, and we’re alone in the vestibule.
“I have to get back to my troops, Grayson, but keep your schedule clear. Meet me after evening chow, at 1900. We have a bit of a club set up in one of the maintenance sheds. Foxtrot Deck, F2029. We have stuff to talk about.”
I spend the rest of the day sighting in my rifles and running my new battle armor through all its self-test protocols. My specialized combat controller kit is two generations behind the stuff that burned up in my locker on the Manitoba, but all the comms and network modules work as they should, and my armor doesn’t have any dents or leaks. Without a bug suit, my combat endurance on a Lanky world is measured in hours instead of days, but since none of the other grunts have been issued a HEBA kit, I consider it a fairly safe bet that we’re not going head-on against an established Lanky colony.
Like a good soldier, I head down to Foxtrot Deck fifteen minutes early. Unit F2029 is a maintenance and storage cube in a corner of the grease monkey zone by the hangar, partitioned from the rest of the deck with plastalloy mesh wiring. Two HD troopers stand by the open entrance, but they don’t do anything to keep me from entering. In the storage cube, someone has piled up stacks of modular equipment crates all along the mesh walls, forming a sight barrier eight feet high. Inside the makeshift privacy walls, more equipment crates have been requisitioned as furniture, serving as benches and tables. There are a dozen HD troopers lounging in the storage unit, and all of them turn their heads my way when I walk in.