Lines of Departure

by Marko Kloos

  At this revelation, not even military discipline and briefing protocol can stop the assembled troops from voicing their surprise. All at once, a few hundred conversations break out in the room. I look at the SI major, and notice with some satisfaction that he seems just as surprised as we are. Fleet Command played their cards closely on this one, and even though I had guessed that the grunts were going to get the short end of the stick again, the magnitude of the news leaves me momentarily gut-punched.

  “We don’t know how they pull it off exactly, but we do know that the Lankies use our transition nodes—ours and the SRA’s—to pinpoint our colonies. We’ve basically set up a bunch of blinking road signs for them. Therefore, Fleet has decided to shut the whole network down until we figure out how to counter those seed ships. Our transition to Fomalhaut was the last one before Fleet turned off the transit node on the solar system side. The beacons are deactivated, and the transition points are being mined with nukes right now.”

  “Shut it!” the major at the front of the room shouts when the swelling din of exclamations from the assembled garrison threatens to overwhelm the audio from the overhead address system, where the general is undoubtedly on a one-way feed. The noise level in the room decreases, but not by much.

  “…can’t tell you how long this task force will be on station in this system. I can tell you, however, that we will fly the flag of the Commonwealth on New Svalbard for however long it takes—a month, a year, or more. We will defend this moon against any threat, whether Russian, Chinese, or Lanky, until Command reopens the Alcubierre network and relieves us.

  “Until that happens, nothing will change. Promotion schedules are still in effect. Anyone whose term of enlistment expires during our stay will be able to reenlist for another regular term, or have their original term extended until we get back to Earth. Those of you who choose to serve another full enlistment will be eligible for an additional discharge bonus.”

  Some of the troopers at the table let out suppressed laughs at this. The HD soldiers are mostly either shell-shocked or talking amongst themselves. The commotion in the room is at an entirely unacceptable level for an address by a general officer, but the brass at the front of the room don’t make much of an effort to suppress the noise.

  “I expect every one of you to keep doing your duty until we are relieved and called home. The ships of the task force will set up a picket and assume orbital-patrol duties.

  “We’re in a good position, tactically speaking. We have enough ordnance to hold off a superior force, and enough supplies to stay on independent duty out here for many months. We have two battalions plus on the ground, with combat teams of at least platoon strength at every terraforming station. We have an embarked regiment on the Midway that can drop onto any trouble spot on the moon within an hour. We have all the gear and troops we need to give a bloody nose to half a brigade of SRA marines. And if the Lankies find this rock before the fleet calls us back, we’ll throw everything we have at them the second the first of them puts a toe on this moon.”

  Every Spaceborne Infantry grunt in the room knows that if the Lankies want the place, they’ll take it, regardless of the number of rifles we point at them. The general’s little pep talk is probably designed to make the HD contingent less anxious about getting dumped on a backwoods moon to mount a hopeless defense, but I can see on the faces all around me that the bullshit detectors of the Homeworld Defense troopers are just as finely calibrated as ours.

  “Say, Staff Sergeant Grayson,” Master Sergeant Fallon addresses me, loud enough for the rest of the table to hear. “How many colony planets and moons have the Lankies contested so far?”

  “Forty-four at last count, Master Sergeant Fallon,” I reply in the same volume.

  “And how many did we successfully defend, Sergeant Grayson?”

  “Zero at last count, Master Sergeant Fallon.”

  There are nervous chuckles all around us. At the head of the room, the SI major launches another appeal to keep the noise level down. Overhead, the general continues his little speech over the one-way circuit, unaware of the sudden unrest among the ranks.

  “We will dig in, and we will hold the line until we are relieved. The Lankies have never shown any interest in the Fomalhaut system, and the Sino-Russians have other problems, so I predict we will have a nice, quiet stay on New Svalbard.”

  Sergeant Fallon leans back in her chair and folds her arms across her chest. Unlike most of her HD troopers, she doesn’t look shocked or dismayed. Instead, there’s a knowing sort of smile on her face, as if she just heard the punch line to a good, but familiar joke.

  “Now, see,” she says in my direction, “I wouldn’t bet any money on that.”

  CHAPTER 16

  We waltz into town like the command section of a conquering army.

  I’m in the back of one of Camp Frostbite’s armored cargo mules, eight-wheeled transport tanks shaped like giant doorstops made out of composite armor. The troop compartment is big enough for a ten-man squad in full kit. I’m the only fleet puke in the vehicle. The other seats in the troop bay are occupied by the COs of the two Homeworld Defense battalions, the major in charge of the Spaceborne Infantry garrison company, and all three of their senior sergeants. In the bucket seat next to mine, Sergeant Fallon is napping, or pretending to, with her arms folded across her chest. By orders from upstairs, we’re all wearing full combat armor minus our helmets, and we’re carrying sidearms and rifles. The general in charge of the task force is a reservist who hasn’t seen any combat since the tussle with the Lankies started, and he’s utterly afraid we’ll all be caught with our pants down if the Lankies suddenly show up in orbit. Those of us who have been fighting them for the last five years know that it won’t make a bit of a difference if we’re in armor or not when they show up, and that our little oxygen tanks will merely give us a few hours to contemplate our impending deaths. But orders are orders, so we look like a bunch of heavily armed football players spoiling for a fight with the locals.

  When we roll past the first buildings of New Longyearbyen, the HD troopers turn in their seats to peer out of the small armored windows in curiosity. I follow suit, even though I’ve seen plenty of colonial architecture in the last few years. Only the major in command of the garrison company doesn’t bother craning his neck, and Sergeant Fallon is still snoozing with her head on her chest.

  New Longyearbyen is like no other colony settlement I’ve ever seen. Every single building is overengineered, almost bunker-like, to withstand the harsh winter climate that locks the moon down for half the planetary year. Where the housing and facilities on a warm colony world are mostly the same standard squares of prefabricated modular housing, the structures here on New Svalbard are custom-made domes with meter-thick ferroconcrete walls. The buildings are laid out not on straight and even street grids, but in loops and irregular patterns designed by computers to minimize the effects of the hundred-klick-per-hour winds that blow even in the temperate tundra belt in the middle of the winter season.

  Our driver snakes the huge armored mule along roads that are mostly turns.

  When we pull up in front of the civilian admin building, and the mule comes to a gentle stop with a snort of its hydropneumatic suspension, Sergeant Fallon’s eyes pop open, and she looks around in the crew compartment with an exaggerated yawn.

  “We there yet?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Welcome to the booming metropolis of New Longyearbyen, population ten K.”

  We climb out of the armored troop hatch, battle armor scraping against polysteel laminate plating as seven of us in full kit squeeze out of a hatch no designer ever tried to negotiate while wearing hardshell battle rattle and carrying rifles with twenty-inch barrels and clunky attachments.

  The admin building here in town is even more solid looking than the bunker-like one the Chinese had on Sirius Ad before their own attack craft blew it into rubble. The whole thing looks like a huge loaf of bread. It’s windowless, and judging from
the visible wall thickness by the regularly spaced entrance alcoves, the concrete is at least two meters thick. All along the top of the building, there are sensor domes and retractable comms antennas that make the building look like the top half of a fleet frigate buried in the permafrost.

  The four HD troopers look around with interest, while the SI major and his company sergeant look pointedly casual, old hands at the planetary excursion business. There are snowcapped mountains in the distance, much higher than anything the Eastern Seaboard back home has to offer, and I have to concede that as far as first visits to another world go, New Svalbard is one of the more scenic ones.

  As we stand and gawk, the closest door of the nearby admin building opens, and a uniformed civvie steps out. He’s very tall, and his blue-shirted chest has a circumference that would give any fleet armorer sweats if he had to be issued off-the-rack battle armor. His uniform is a dark-blue set of fatigues with white arm patches, and there’s a shield-shaped badge over his left breast pocket that identifies him as a colonial constable, a civilian peace officer. He’s wearing glasses with small, circular lenses. As he walks out of the entrance vestibule and over to where we’re stretching our legs, I notice that he has a five o’clock shadow at nine in the morning. There’s a sidearm in a well-worn Durathread holster on his thigh, an older model large-bore metallic cartridge autoloader. The military stopped issuing those a hundred years ago because they’re useless against battle armor, but run-of-the-mill civilian criminals don’t routinely wear ballistic hardshell.

  “Hey, Matt,” the SI major greets the constable. “How’s it going?”

  “Not too bad,” the cop says. He eyes the armored eight-wheeler behind us. “What’s with the hardware? You expecting trouble?”

  “What do you mean?”

  The constable nods at the thirty-five-millimeter autocannon on the roof of the mule. The weapons mount is modular, and the crews usually run the local mules without heavy armament, but our task force commander’s new orders regarding battle readiness aren’t limited to trooper armament.

  “Yeah, that,” the major says, almost sheepishly. “New management. Some Earthside one-star reservist who hasn’t been in a tussle with the Lankies yet. I think he’s expecting them to drop out of the sky any second.”

  “Well, I’m glad you folks have some sensible leadership now,” the constable says with a dry smirk. “That peashooter’s going to make all the difference if we get a seed ship dropping on our heads this afternoon. I’ll tell the rest of the colony we’re invasion-proof now.”

  Everyone has a good, borderline insubordinate chuckle at this. I decide that I like the tall constable already.

  “Introductions,” the major says. He points to each of us in turn. “Lieutenant Colonel Kemp, Lieutenant Colonel Decker, Master Sergeant Fallon, Sergeant Major Dalton, Sergeant Major Zelnick, Staff Sergeant Grayson. This is Constable Guest, the senior law-enforcement official here on New Svalbard.”

  “Head of a vast army of minions,” Constable Guest adds. “Twenty-one sworn officers, and four part-timers.” He looks at the assembled interservice mix of troops. “Lot of brass here for one little moon. I heard about all the new Earthside soldiers you dropped at the terraformers. Two battalions’ worth? Don’t tell me we’re getting ready to fight someone for this place.”

  “Not as far as we know,” the major says. “We got something else going on, though. Is the administrator in?”

  “When isn’t he?” Constable Guest says. “The science crew is here, too. They’re doing their weekly admin devotional.”

  “Without you?”

  “Stepped out for some fresh air,” he shrugs. “Go on in. Second floor, the big conference room next to the kitchen. You know the place.”

  “Yeah, I do.” The major turns to the rest of us. “If you want to follow me, I’ll show you around and introduce you to the administrator and his crew. Staff Sergeant Grayson, you may want to head over to the airfield, meet up with the ATC on duty, and familiarize yourself with the facilities, in case we need your services later on.”

  “Roger that, sir,” I reply. “Never was much of a meeting type anyway.”

  I watch as the other troops file into the building behind the major. Behind me, the driver of the mule gingerly maneuvers his oversized vehicle into a clear spot next to the building across the narrow street to free up the path for other vehicles. Some colonists are milling around at a safe distance to watch the camouflaged steel monster with its out-of-place cannon armament try to fit into spaces never designed for Spaceborne Infantry fighting vehicles. We probably could have taken one of the light, unarmored mini-mules or walked the mile and a half outright, but the new brass elected to take the steel beast, and I just tagged along for the ride as the junior member of the entourage.

  I’ve been to New Svalbard a few times, but always as a passenger on a ship stopping for water. I’ve never been down to the civvie airfield. When I ask Constable Guest if he can give me directions, he shrugs with a smile.

  “Sure thing, but it’s a bit of a hike. You can hoof it across town, or I can give you a ride, if you don’t mind being the passenger on a dinky ATV.”

  “I’d appreciate that,” I say. “And you can be sure that any dignity I may have retained after Basic is long gone by now.”

  The airfield is much more sophisticated than I expected. I had pictured a gravel landing pad and a few fuel tanks, like the ones that seem to be standard on every minor colonial outpost. Instead, the constable’s ATV rolls onto a facility that looks more advanced than the drop-ship landing pad up at Camp Frostbite. There are half a dozen hangar buildings with abnormally thick concrete domes, and as we drive up the central alley formed by the hangars, I can see thick hydraulic blast doors that look like they’d stop a MARS warhead cold.

  “They built it to handle all the planetary freight traffic and then some,” Constable Guest says over the low hum of the ATV’s electric drive. “We don’t have an orbital replenishing facility yet, but the crew at the water storage depot can refill the tanks on a tanker shuttle in twenty minutes flat.”

  The tarmac here is smooth concrete. There’s a landing area for VTOL traffic that has a dozen individual landing zones stenciled onto it, and the facility has an actual runway, thousands of meters of smooth blacktop stretching into the distance.

  “Dual redundant AILS, for the frequent shit weather, full civil and military refueling capacity, and all the latest in weather systems and navigational aids. We even have a satellite network now for comms and nav fixes. The place may not look like much, but we have pretty shiny gear down here. All we’re missing is an orbital service facility, so the big guys don’t have to send the tanker shuttles down here to top off their drinking water or reactor-fuel mass. ’Course, the way things are going, we won’t be getting any upgrades any time soon. Not with the colony flights at an end.”

  The constable lets the ATV roll to a stop in front of a building that looks like a small-scale copy of the massive admin facility in town. The only difference is the obvious air-traffic-control tower grafted onto the short side of the building that faces the runway and the VTOL landing pads.

  “It’s not just the colony flights,” I say into the silence following the shutdown of the ATV’s power train. Constable Guest looks at me with a raised eyebrow. “You’re missing a peach of a briefing up there in Admin Central,” I tell him. “You want to tag along while I bring the local ATC crew up to speed?”

  It takes me all of two minutes to introduce myself and share the news with the half dozen air-traffic controllers and pilots on duty this morning. By the time I finish, there is utter silence in the flight-ops control room for a few moments, and the expressions of polite interest have given way to unconcealed shock and dismay.

  “You can’t be serious,” the flight-ops supervisor says. He’s a stocky and hard-looking man who wouldn’t look out of place in a master sergeant’s uniform. His name tag says BARNETT, and even though the civvie overalls don’t h
ave rank insignia, his demeanor marks him as the guy in charge. “Shut down all of it? The whole thing?”

  “Yes, the whole thing. No traffic into or out of the solar system, or between the extrasolar transit hubs. They pushed out a bunch of ships with supplies for the colonies, and pulled the plug. We’re on our own.”

  “For how long? We got all the water we’ll ever need, but we do need food deliveries. This place isn’t exactly popping with agriculture, you know.”

  “I have no idea,” I say. “I’m a staff sergeant. They don’t usually invite me to staff officer briefings. The general says they’ll keep it locked until they’ve figured out how to stop the Lanky expansion.”

  Chief Barnett chuckles without humor.

  “If the people at Defense are as dim as the ones running the Colonial Administration, that could take a few decades.”

  “I guess we better figure out how to grow lettuce and potatoes in permafrost,” Constable Guest says.

  The local airfield’s control center has better gear than any military facility I’ve ever seen. I’m in the middle of updating my tactical computer with the civilian frequencies when the earbud of my comms unit chirps with incoming traffic.

  “Sergeant Grayson, Major Vandenberg. What’s your status over there?”

  “Updating my tac kit, sir. Another ten minutes, and I’m good.”

  “You may want to expedite. We’re heading back to the ranch, RFN.”

  “Copy that. I’m on my way. Grayson out.”

  I shut down the data link to my portable tactical unit in mid-update reluctantly, and gather my kit.

  Constable Guest and his ATV are gone when I get downstairs, so I walk back the way we came. When I’m about a quarter mile from the admin center, the mule comes rolling around a corner in front of me, much more quickly than safety regs proscribe for driving through a civvie town. I jog toward them, and the mule stops in front of me, suspension snorting air.