by Marko Kloos
“Get lost somewhere, Sergeant?” a first lieutenant asks me, with only the barest hint of cordiality in his voice.
“Looking for Master Sergeant Fallon,” I say. The stares from the HD troopers aren’t exactly hostile, but they’re not welcoming, either. I’m suddenly keenly aware of the fact that I came down here unarmed, and that every one of the HD grunts in the room is wearing at least a combat knife.
“He’s okay,” Sergeant Fallon’s voice comes from behind me. She steps past me into the room, still in battle armor. “Grayson was one of my guys in the 365th. He’s been in the shit with me.”
The suppressed hostility dissipates from the room. I notice that even the first lieutenant instantly defers to Sergeant Fallon. She walks over to one of the makeshift benches and drops down on it with a grunt.
“Come and have a seat, Grayson,” she says. “The guys don’t bite. We’re all friends down here.”
I do as directed and sit down across the makeshift table from Sergeant Fallon, who is opening the latches of her chest and back plates with practiced hands. She pulls off the hard shells of the outer armor and lets them drop to the deck.
“Long fucking day,” she says to me, and puts her feet up on the crate that serves as a table. “I don’t know how you fleet pukes can stand it, spending months in these coffins. I’ve only been walking around in here for a day and a half, and I’m already getting claustrophobic.”
“It helps to remind yourself just how much room there is on the other side of that hull,” I say. “Think of it as cozy. Just be glad you’re on a carrier. Lots of legroom. Frigate’s about a twentieth of the tonnage.”
“This is what you’ve been doing the last five years? Sitting around in one of these tin cans?”
“Well, that, and taking it to the Lankies. Tell you what, those SRA marines aren’t half bad when your other option is fighting something that’s eighty feet tall and bulletproof.”
“Did they tell you where we’re going?”
I shake my head. “Not a clue. They dragged this old thing out of mothballs and rushed us out the door, and that’s all I know. That was the fastest pre-deployment prep I’ve ever seen.”
“You know how they got us ground pounders ready for this shit?” Sergeant Fallon asks. “Six days at Camp Jarhead, with a bunch of SI instructors. Six days! And half those space monkeys didn’t know their ass from a hole in the ground. If those guys are supposed to be our first line of defense up here, we must be good and fucked.”
“Six days,” I repeat in disbelief. SI combat school for infantry soldiers takes three months, half of which are spent in zero-g and hostile environment training at Camp Gray on Luna. Six days are barely enough to get people used to moving in low gravity without killing themselves.
“Yeah,” Sergeant Fallon says. “And no new gear, either. They showed us how to fire those M-80s and the crew-served autocannons, but they didn’t issue us any. What the fuck are we going to do with our popguns up here?”
I don’t have a good answer for her, so I just shake my head in commiseration. With two battalions of Earthside grunts lacking anti-Lanky weaponry, our still-secret destination has got to be an SRA colony planet; otherwise those fifteen hundred Homeworld Defense troopers are just very inefficient ballast.
“A squad can take a Lanky with those popguns,” I say. “You just have to get the drop on it and blow your whole ammo load, and even then it’s a shaky thing. Also, they run in groups, just like we do.”
“Awesome,” one of the other troopers says, and the others start an unhappy little chorus of murmurs.
“Doesn’t matter,” Sergeant Fallon says. “If we get to go up against those things, we’re all fucked anyway, cruising around in this museum exhibit. But I doubt that’s why we’re up here.”
She looks at me for a moment, biting on her lower lip slightly as if she’s appraising me.
“You keeping up with the news from Earthside, Grayson?”
“Not really,” I say. “Don’t have much time to watch the Networks. Whatever we get is canned shit anyway. MilNet’s just boring shit, unit news and feel-good crap.”
“They’re keeping the lid on tight,” Sergeant Fallon says. “Color me shocked.”
“You suggesting that Fleet Command sanitizes our news?” I ask with mock incredulity. Several of the troopers chuckle, but Sergeant Fallon does not even smile at my joke. Instead, she looks around again, and then leans across the table, propping her elbows on the scuffed olive-green polyplast of the crate.
“You remember Detroit, right? The night we lost two drop ships and a bunch of troops?”
I lightly touch the side of my tunic, placing two fingers onto the spot where some welfare rioter with a stolen rifle put two fléchette rounds into me, piercing one lung and a few yards of intestine.
“Yeah, I remember Detroit,” I say. “Wish I didn’t.”
“Well, five years ago, that was an emergency. These days, it’s the rule. The PRCs have their own militias now, and they own the ground. Most of the big cities, the cops don’t even go in anymore, ’cause the welfare rats have better hardware. All our calls are ‘weapons free’ from the start now.”
“You have got to be kidding.”
“Wish I wasn’t,” she says, precisely aping the tone of my own remark. “You people up here, you’re at war with the Sino-Russkies and the Lankies. Down Earthside, we’re at war with our own people, Grayson.”
“All the PRCs? That’s, what, half a billion people? Shit, BosProv has twenty million all by itself. There’s no way they can keep a lid on all of those.”
“We’re not,” Sergeant Fallon says. “We’re barely holding the line. We let them kill each other all they want, let them run their own shows in the PRCs. We only come out of our forts to break kneecaps whenever the sewage starts spilling out into the ’burbs, and they torch a few middle-class citizens in their hydrocars and their air-conditioned crackerbox houses. If it’s just two groups of welfare rats shooting it out, nobody gives a shit anymore.”
“And they can afford to send two full battalions up here to help us out?”
“Ah.” Sergeant Fallon smiles without humor. “And now we get to the heart of the matter.”
She looks around at her troops, as if checking for consent. Nobody says anything.
“We’re troublemakers, Grayson. Mutineers. The 330th is a penal battalion, like I told you. So’s the 309th. Your SI troopies with their maroon beanies and the live ammo in their rifles, standing around the edge of the flight deck? They’re not there to teach us the ropes or boost our combat power. They’re there to keep us in check, in case we get silly ideas.”
It’s common knowledge that the fleet is taking advantage of the peculiar nature of message distribution across interstellar distances to present a selective and sanitized version of world news. As I listen to Sergeant Fallon’s narrative of the NAC’s recent trouble on its own soil, I am nonetheless amazed at how thoroughly they’ve kept us in the dark. I remember my trip to see Mom in Boston just a few weeks ago, and the omnipresent riot cops that all seemed to be on edge constantly. They had told me just how bad things had gotten in the old neighborhood, but according to Sergeant Fallon, Boston is a calm oasis of civil tranquility compared to almost every metroplex south of the Mason-Dixon line or west of the Rockies. The colony flights have stopped entirely, the Basic Nutritional Allowance rations are getting reduced by hundreds of calories every other month, and the pressure in the tenements has become too great without the few safety valves there used to be. Now the PRCs are lawless free-fire zones, and only the thin green line of Homeworld Defense troopers is keeping the place from unraveling completely. Once again, it seems that the Lankies aren’t doing anything to our species that we can’t do to each other all on our own.
“The first mutiny wasn’t even one,” Sergeant Fallon says. “It was just some company CO down in Atlanta-Macon, refused an order from the battalion CO to clean out a tenement high-rise with gunships. They didn’t e
ven get violent or anything. Company CO tells his unit to stand down, and they do. No bloodshed. Division takes the whole battalion off the line, and dissolves the company. One hundred and forty-eight discharges on the spot, all benefits and accrued paychecks forfeit.”
“Holy crap,” I say. “Kicked out the whole company?”
“Every last grunt, from the company commander down to the privates folding laundry back in the supply group.”
“What a shit move.”
“Now the second mutiny—that was a real one. This time, they had a captain who had taken Neo-Constitutional Law back at Officer U, and he decides in the middle of a drop that using remote sentry cannons on unarmed civvies is illegal. So he tells his people to stand down. Only this time, Battalion sends in another company to arrest them and secure their gear, and the captain with the law degree decides that that’s an illegal order, too. So they don’t come quietly, and start a two-company firefight in the middle of a busy PRC that’s already in full riot anyway. The armed civvies jump into the fight on the side of the mutinous unit, and before you know it, there’s a hundred dead grunts on the ground, the battalion’s standby gunship wing making bombing runs with incendiaries, and ten square miles of SoTenn-Chattanooga are burning. That did not look too good on the Networks, I’ll tell you that.”
I should be astonished and angry, but I’m not really surprised, and I’ve long since lost the right to be outraged. Five years ago, I held the line on the ground against people who could have been my neighbors and schoolmates had we dropped into Boston instead of Detroit, and I ended up putting a bunker-buster missile into a building full of people. Part of my conscience tries to convince me to this day that there were no unarmed civvies in the high-rise by then, that anyone with half a brain would have gotten out of there when the shooting started, but my rational side knows better. I remember how we fought our way through the darkened city that night, scared shitless, standing on a carpet of discarded fléchette sabots, and mentally marking everything not in TA battle armor as a “kill on sight” target. Whether we were justified or not, whether it was legal at the time or not, morality left the equation the first time one of us pulled the trigger on a welfare citizen. If my oath of service commits me to the protection of the rights and freedoms of the Commonwealth’s citizens, I’ve violated it dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of times since I got out of boot camp.
“We have guys going home on leave all the time. Nobody’s picked up any rumors about HD units in mutiny.”
“There’s nobody to talk to,” Sergeant Fallon says. “Most HD units are confined to base between drops now, and when you get down there on leave, they won’t let you anywhere near a hot PRC or an unstable unit. How many HD froggies did you bump into when you were last Earthside, Grayson?”
“None,” I say. “Just cops and MPs.”
Sergeant Fallon turns her palms up in a “there you have it” gesture, and I digest this information for a few moments.
“HD grunts are the main muscle on the ground. They get enough battalions just sitting down and saying no, they won’t have any way to keep the welfare rats in the PRCs. Unless they start giving drop ships and infantry training to the city cops.”
“Exactly,” she says.
“So how did you end up on the shit list, Sarge?”
“Oh, hell, you know me,” she says with a smile. “I don’t think it was any particular thing, really. I’ve been a pain in Division’s ass since before you joined us. They say I have a problem with authority. I say I have a low tolerance for stupid.”
“What was the excuse?”
“Failure to comply with a direct order from a superior officer, conspiracy, blah blah blah. You know the mutinous company I told you about, the one that ended up shooting it out with another unit?”
“Yeah.”
“That was Bravo Company, from the 300th. The 365th was the one they called up first to smoke ’em out. You remember your old pal, Major Unwerth? He was the head Indian in charge at Battalion that day. I told my company commander that my platoon wouldn’t shoot at fellow HD grunts, and the captain came around to my viewpoint.”
She smiles again, this time with a spark of genuine joy in her eyes.
“God, it was such a pleasure to tell that useless sack of shit to go fuck himself. I may have even used the all-battalion channel. Terrible abuse of non-commissioned-officer-in-charge privileges.”
“Terrible,” I concur, and we both grin.
“He got the last laugh, of course. I spent a month in the brig after that. They didn’t want to give me a proper court-martial. Didn’t want the pictures of the sergeant with the Medal of Honor on her Class A standing before a tribunal. Plus, some of the NCOs from the 300th used the unlawful-order defense, and the media got wind of the whole thing somehow. So they let me out of the brig a few weeks later and handed me my marching orders. Dissolved the platoon, and spread us out all over the 330th. The whole battalion is nothing but obedience-challenged grunts from all over the brigade.”
“They’re not helping us out,” I conclude. “They’re getting rid of you.”
Sergeant Fallon shrugs.
“That way we’re not a bad influence on the units that still do as they’re told.”
“And you don’t cause the brass any sleepless nights, having to worry about a whole battalion turning on them and giving drop ships to the PRC militias.”
“Better to just shunt us off into space, get ground up by the Lankies, or cool our jets on some deserted rock far away from Earth. You got it, Grayson.”
“The question is—where the hell are they sending us? Where are they going to stick two battalions of combat troops they want to keep away from the rest of the corps?”
“Beats me,” Sergeant Fallon says. “All I know is that the corps is at the end of its rope, and so’s the entire Commonwealth. Things are going to come to a head pretty soon, and we’re getting ringside seats to that particular show.”
Overhead, the speakers of the shipboard announcement system pop to life with a brief squelch.
“Now hear this, now hear this. All hands, prepare for Alcubierre transition. Repeat, all hands prepare for Alcubierre transition. Infantry passengers, report to your assigned areas. Countdown twenty minutes.”
All the HD troopers in the room look at me, eager for some explanation of the unfamiliar protocol.
“We’re hitting the chute for FTL travel to wherever the hell we’re going.”
“How long is that going to take?” someone asks.
“No idea. Depends on the system. Could be two hours, could be twenty. They never tell you the destination ahead of time.”
Beyond the wall of crates making up the walls of the makeshift lounge, there’s the shuffling of many pairs of boots on the deck as the crewmembers of the Midway rush to their duty stations.
“Well, you heard the brass,” Sergeant Fallon says, and stands up to collect her armor plates. “Let’s go back to our little tent village and see where the rabbit hole pukes us out.”
She claps me on the back as she walks by.
“Good to see you again, Andrew. Maybe we’ll have some more time to catch up on things before the world completely goes to shit.”
I spend the last twenty minutes before our Alcubierre transition composing two last messages to Mom and Halley. I know they’ll most likely never leave the Midway’s neural-network data banks, but I send them anyway, just in case this is my last chance to say good-bye.
I will keep my promise. See you in six months. I love you.—Andrew
When I hit the send button on the message to my fiancée, I realize that this is the first time I’ve said those three words to her.
Wherever we’re going, I’m determined to come back from it, even if I have to shoulder aside every Lanky in the universe.
CHAPTER 15
Task Force 230.7 is barely deserving of its name. The small group of mostly tired old hulls that transitions through the chute with us could probably defeat
a single new destroyer, but I wouldn’t want to be part of the crew that tried it. There’s the eighty-year-old Midway, escorted by a light cruiser that’s almost as old, a frigate from another near-obsolete class, and a cargo ship from the auxiliary fleet. We have exactly one hull in our task force that’s younger than I am. However, that hull is the Indianapolis, and she’s just a lightly armed orbital-patrol craft barely big enough for a fusion plant and an Alcubierre drive. The only bright spot in the order of battle is the Portsmouth, one of the fleet’s fast and well-armed resupply ships.
Our misfit assembly of ill-matched ships pops out of Alcubierre after seven hours of transition. I’ve ridden the interstellar pathways of the fleet’s Alcubierre network hundreds of times, and while you can’t ever deduce your destination before the transition—the fleet ships vary their speeds and never go a direct course to the outbound chutes—you can tell the distance traveled by the time spent in transition, because ships can’t dogleg or vary their speed in the bubble. Seven hours puts us close to the Thirty, and I pull out my PDP to check the star charts for possible candidates at that distance, but the CIC saves me the work with an all-ship announcement.
“All hands, stand down from transition stations. Welcome to Fomalhaut.”
Fomalhaut, I think. A huge system that’s mostly hostile to human life. If they wanted to ship us off to an interstellar gulag, they picked just about the perfect spot.
Four hours after our transition into the Fomalhaut system, Captain Michaelson summons the SpecOps company for a briefing. When I walk into the makeshift ready room, there are maybe four squads’ worth of troopers sitting on the hastily arranged folding chairs. Captain Michaelson is at the front of the room, leaning on the briefing lectern.