by Marko Kloos
“I should get back to CIC and leave you to your business. As you were.”
She walks over to the ladder well and swings one foot over the threshold.
“Don’t be so sure of your judgment. You ran, we stayed, you’re wrong, we’re right. I hope you never have to make that kind of choice. But if you ever do, maybe you’ll remember this. Nobody’s ever the bad guy in their own mind, Lieutenant. Sometimes you just have to pick between two bad choices and decide which one is a little less awful than the other. The one that’ll let you sleep a tiny bit better at night.”
She nods at me and starts her climb back into Phalanx’s hull, leaving me alone with my thoughts underneath the star-studded blackness of space.
CHAPTER 10
FLEET ASSEMBLY POINT ECHO
Phalanx leaves the dock at Gateway precisely at 0700 hours on Monday morning. It’s November, and I don’t know whether it’s overcast down in Liberty Falls right now, but it feels overcast here in this ship even though there’s nothing but black above and behind us. I got out of my bunk at the last watch change an hour ago, and I’m returning from the officer mess and a sparse meal of scrambled eggs and coffee when the overhead announcement system trills.
“All hands, this is Colonel Yamin. I just gave the order to clear the docking collar and secure all airlocks. In a few minutes, we will disconnect the service umbilicals and cut loose from Gateway for our run to the fleet assembly area.”
Phalanx’s commander pauses for a few seconds before she continues her address.
“You all know what we are about to do, and where we are about to go. I’ve ordered the CIC watch to put the video feed from Phalanx’s main camera array onto every viewscreen on the ship. Take a moment, and look at the feed if you can.”
I turn on the little viewscreen in my stateroom. It shows a slice of Earth below Phalanx and Gateway in ultrahigh resolution. Most of the continent below us is covered in clouds, but I can make out part of the North American coastline, the familiar shape of the northern East Coast. It’s a perfect shot if you wanted to include a promo image of Earth in some sort of intergalactic travel guide—the blue-and-white planet, teeming with life and activity, and the thin sliver of atmosphere separating all that life from the vastness of space. You only realize how thin that atmospheric layer really is once you get to see it from this vantage point. The horizon in the distance goes from white to light blue, then to star-studded dark blue in the space of just a few degrees of view angle. My physics teacher used to say that the atmospheric layer is as thin as the condensation on the peel of an orange when you breathe on it. Even the moon is cooperating for the beauty shot—it’s up above the horizon just above the atmospheric transition layer, so close and clear that I can make out the network of structures on Luna City and its surroundings.
“This is what we are going to defend,” Phalanx’s commander continues. “This is where we started crawling out of the mud a hundred millennia ago. This is where we built our cities and made our histories. This is where our friends and families are, everything we hold dear. This is what’s going to be taken from us if we don’t beat the Lankies back here and now. We stand and fight, or we fade into the black forever.”
I look at the slice of Earth visible on the camera feed, so vast when you’re this close to it, and yet so small when you consider how much nothingness is all around us just in the solar system, never mind the rest of the universe. On a cosmic scale, our species and its history are utterly irrelevant, probably just one sentient life-form among millions. But I’m not ready to let it all disappear into the void just yet.
“So we stand, and so we fight,” the skipper says. “Stand to and man your posts. We will return when we’ve done our jobs, and that little blue orb will still be home. I’ll be damned if I let those bastards kick us off. All hands, prepare for departure.”
The announcement ends, and I am left to think about the skipper’s words as I sit alone in my stateroom, looking at the screen in front of me, where Earth keeps on rotating slowly in space. I’ve left Gateway on combat deployments so many times that I thought I was inoculated against the feeling I have right now, the premonition that I’m seeing my home planet for the last time. I see myself on the surface of Mars again, thousands of Lankies in front of me, and then nuclear fireballs, a dream that may be on the way to becoming reality.
Half an hour later, as we coast away from Gateway at the low speed prescribed for orbital maneuvers, the skipper’s voice comes over the 1MC again. I look up from my PDP and the message I am typing out to Halley.
“All hands, check the viewscreens.”
Colonel Yamin says nothing else, and I look over at the screen in my stateroom again. The camera angle no longer shows Earth. It’s trained on the section of orbit between Gateway and Independence Stations. There is a lot of orbital traffic between us and there—civvie freighters, orbital shuttles, corvettes, and patrol boats from smaller countries. Every one of the dozens of ships in sight has its exterior lights on, and they’re all blinking in synchronicity, a coordinated farewell to the departing warships on the way into battle. I’ve been feeling glum all morning, but the sight of this unexpected gesture from the people who can’t go off to battle with us suddenly makes me feel glad to be up here. Billions of people on the planet and thousands of personnel here in orbit have no choice but to sit this fight out and wait anxiously to see if they get to live on. I get to have a hand in the outcome of the battle. As small as my contribution may be in the end, I get to add my weight to our side of the scale, and that’s more than almost everyone else gets.
>We are under way. See you at the assembly point. I love you.
I send the message off to Halley, taking the opportunity while we’re still in range of the relay on Gateway. Underway, ship-to-ship traffic will be limited to mission essentials, and the near-field comms only work between ships if they are within a few kilometers of each other.
Her reply comes back a few minutes later.
>Pollux is leaving the dock in 45 minutes. I love you too. See you when it’s over. Good hunting.
The screen in my stateroom reverts back to its normal condition, a display of general ship information—course, speed, position, ship-wide announcements. One quadrant of the screen is taken up by the feed from the tactical plot in CIC, a three-dimensional representation of the space around the ship. I reach over and flick the tactical display so it takes up the entire screen. Gateway is already a few thousand kilometers behind us as Phalanx is accelerating to full military power and pulling away from the anchorage. We are part of a long line of blue and green lozenge-shaped icons, each representing an NAC or allied ship, each labeled with hull number and name. We’re not even at the fleet assembly point yet, but the space around Phalanx already contains more warships than I’ve seen in one spot since the run back from Fomalhaut. There’s something exhilarating about seeing that much combat power in motion, for once tackling the threat with a plan and a realistic chance instead of just throwing hardware against a wall to see it shatter.
When forty-five minutes since my exchange with Halley have passed, I check the display again for her ship, NACS Pollux, but we are too far ahead in the queue by now, and the awareness bubble of the CIC’s situational display isn’t large enough to track the carrier. Still, I know that she’s behind me somewhere, a few thousand kilometers astern from Phalanx and heading the same way.
We spend the day squaring away kit and eating meals in our respective facilities—the mess hall for the enlisted, and the officer wardroom for the junior officers among us: Lieutenant Bondarenko from the SRA marines, Lieutenant Perkins of the SI’s Force Recon team, Lieutenant Stahl from Eurocorps, and me. All the officers on the embarked SOCOM team are from different service arms and wearing four different camo patterns. When dinnertime comes around and we still don’t have orders or a schedule from our commanding officers, we all end up around the same table in the officer wardroom for lack of something else to do.
L
ieutenant Bondarenko isn’t as gregarious as Dmitry, and his English isn’t half as good, so he stays mostly quiet, but he seems to like the officer chow just fine because he finishes off two plates. Lieutenant Perkins from SI is a year younger than I am but has almost as many combat drops and the typical cocky Force Recon devil-may-care attitude. The Eurocorps lieutenant is fluent in English but speaks with a heavy German accent. We exchange pleasantries and speculate about the upcoming landing on Mars.
“It’ll be the largest spaceborne assault in history,” Lieutenant Perkins says. “I’ve heard we’re dropping a whole division in the first wave, another with the second.”
“You think we scraped together enough troops for several divisions?” I say.
“You don’t think so?”
“I’ve done nothing but run boot-camp cycles for the last year to fill the roster. Two whole divisions? That’s four brigades. Sixteen battalions. Before we lost Mars, the whole SI was just three divisions. But with the SRA and the Europeans kicking in, who knows?”
“They will tell us soon enough,” the German lieutenant says. “I know that Eurocorps has sent one regiment.”
“Every bit counts,” I say, feeling slightly disappointed. One regiment means two battalions of troops—not nothing, but thirteen hundred troops are a mere sliver of the total Eurocorps manpower. But then I remind myself that the Eurocorps troops are mostly geared for peacekeeping on Earth, not space warfare, and that the regiment they’re sending probably constitutes most or all of their space-trained troops.
Counting heads in this room, however, does not make me feel overly confident just yet. The SOCOM team assembled on this ship is pitifully small for spearheading a landing in what is supposed to be the biggest spaceborne invasion ever. But right now there’s nothing to do but to wait for our mission parameters, so we can find out just how much we’ll have to stretch the four podhead teams in this berth.
For once, command updates us on our prospective fate without much undue delay. Ten hours after we leave Gateway, Phalanx turns and burns for our scheduled deceleration. Twenty hours out of Gateway, we coast into a section of space that’s crowded with more warships than I’ve ever seen away from an anchorage together. The safety distance between each ship is five kilometers, and ships are bunched into little groups for as far as the hundred-kilometer tactical display in CIC can render units. I try to get a rough count of ship markers on the situational display in my stateroom but have to give up after three dozen, and I know that there are at least twenty more ships inbound from Earth in the queue behind us. Two-thirds of the markers are NAC or SRA units, and the last third is made up of units from just about every other spacefaring alliance on Earth: South America, Africa, Oceania, European Union. It looks like we weren’t the only ones mobilizing our reserve fleets and refurbishing scrapyard candidates.
“Now hear this,” comes over the ship’s 1MC. “This is Colonel Yamin. We have arrived at Fleet Assembly Point Echo. This is our jump-off point for the offensive. We will take our assigned place in the battle formation and prepare to commence combat operations. From this point on, be ready for battle, because the next combat-stations alert means there are Lankies in the neighborhood and we’re about to send live warheads downrange. From now until we return to Gateway, there will be no more drills. Every alarm will be real.”
Until we return to Gateway, I think. The station is old and worn-out and a pain in the ass to navigate on a busy day, but I find myself hoping that the optimism of Phalanx’s skipper isn’t misplaced, and that I get to curse out the idiot who designed the station at some point again in the near future as I walk Gateway’s scuffed and dirty corridors.
For lack of something better to do at the moment, I watch the display from CIC for a while. The mass of icons slowly moves on the situational globe as Phalanx maneuvers through the assembly area to whatever holding spot they assigned to us. I see that all the groupings of units are truly multinational and interalliance—SRA ships mingling with NAC ones, and Euro or African Commonwealth ships here and there. The capital ships are all NAC or SRA because no other spacefaring nation needs heavy units for extrasolar deployments. They have corvettes, light patrol boats, supply ships, and the occasional frigate or destroyer, all the space fleet needed for policing solar-system outposts and mining nodes. Right now, all those support units are welcome padding for our invasion fleet.
I tear myself loose from the icon ballet on my screen when the comms unit buzzes. I manage to pick up the receiver before the second buzz.
“SOCOM detachment, Lieutenant Grayson.”
“Lieutenant, Major Masoud. Report to briefing room Delta-505 at 0800. All hands, not just the officers. Bring everyone.”
“Aye, sir,” I acknowledge.
I hang up the receiver and get up to bring the word to the rest of the short SOCOM platoon milling around in the berth outside. Whatever our part in this offensive, we are starting now, and we are doing it with what’s on the board.
The briefing room in Grunt Country is more than big enough for the entire usual troop detachment of a Hammerhead cruiser, which is a full company. With the SOCOM detachment numbering little more than a squad, we have plenty of elbow room even with everyone present. When I walk in, Dmitry and his SRA comrades are already sitting in the first row, and I file into the row behind them to sit down at the far end. One by one, the rest of the detachment files in and takes seats in the first three rows: the Eurocorps lieutenant, the two Force Recon teams, and the Spaceborne Rescueman.
Major Masoud walks through the hatch at 0759. The Spaceborne Rescue master sergeant, who is sitting in the spot closest to the hatch, gets to his feet and shouts “Attention on deck!” before we can sort out the formality of rank seniority among us lieutenants. We all get up and stand to attention, even the SRA troopers.
“As you were,” the major says. “Take your seats.”
We sit down again and watch as he strides to the front of the briefing room and turns on the holoscreen that takes up the front bulkhead. He dims the lights in the room with a tap on the screen of the data pad in his hand. The holoscreen behind him displays a slowly rotating seal of the ship: NACS Phalanx CA-761.
“Good morning. Now that we are in the assembly area, I am cleared to brief you on what we are about to do. The name of this operation is Invictus.”
The image behind him changes from the ship seal to a shot of Mars. It’s not a still image, but rather a high-resolution surveillance feed. It’s clearly from the vantage point of an NAC warship because the corners of the feed show the familiar readouts of an optical-sensor array.
“It’s not a big secret that this is our target,” Major Masoud says. “That feed, by the way, is twelve hours old.”
We exchange glances and look back at the feed, and there’s some low murmuring in the room. Even considering the maximum magnification of our best optical arrays, the ship that took the footage must be suicidally close to Mars. There are at least half a dozen Lanky seed ships evident against the red-and-white background of the Martian planetary surface and its cloud cover.
“Who’s on station out there, sir?” I ask.
“NACS Cincinnati,” Major Masoud replies. “They have been observing the target zone for the last two weeks undetected.”
Cincinnati is the sister ship of NACS Indianapolis, the ship that Colonel Campbell flew into an approaching Lanky seed ship last year during the first incursion, enabling the dregs of Earth’s fleets to defeat the incursion and buying us the time to finish construction on the Orions and the battleships. With the destruction of Indy, Cincinnati is the last surviving member of her line, the newly designed orbital combat ship. The OCS is a small stealth unit designed for surveillance and orbital patrol. If Cincy has been keeping eyes on the Lankies for us all this time, she’s probably the most valuable ship left in the fleet despite her low tonnage and light armament.
“Situation,” the major continues, in his typical curt manner. “We are at Fleet Assembly Point Ech
o as part of the Multinational Joint Task Group. Mars is held by a sizable presence of Lankies, including twelve seed ships in orbit and several thousand Lankies in various settlement clusters on the surface. There are eight known emergency shelters with human survivors in need of relief and evacuation. In less than twelve hours, we will have completed our predeployment refueling, and we will depart for Mars in our assigned combat formation, Task Force Red.
“The mission of the Joint Task Group is the destruction of the Lanky fleet in orbit around Mars, the landing of combat troops on the surface, the evacuation of survivors from the still-active emergency shelters, and the elimination of the Lanky threat on Mars.”
“That’s all?” one of the SI Force Recon guys behind me whispers to the SI trooper next to him.
“Execution,” Major Masoud says. “The battle plan has six phases. It will be the longest and most complex spaceborne battle plan we’ve ever executed. Because we can no longer afford mass casualties, each of the phases are designed to allow aborting the rest of the plan and evacuation and retreat of remaining troops if the phase fails catastrophically.”
Major Masoud taps his screen, and the almost-live feed of Mars behind him is replaced with a graphic of a tactical plot.
“In Phase One, the Joint Task Group will engage the Lankies above Mars and destroy them. For that purpose, we are taking along almost the entire remaining stock of Orion missiles. They will be towed by the support ships and fired at maximum range. The target data will come from NACS Cincinnati, which will remain on station throughout and update targeting solutions. The Lankies have been able to sneak up on us many times. This time we are doing the sneaking up, and this time they won’t be able to disappear in the black unseen.”
From the SRA troops in front of me, I hear the muted computer-translated Russian coming through the earpieces of the translator units the fleet has provided our new allies. I know that Dmitry doesn’t really need one, but he is wearing an earpiece anyway and follows the major’s briefing with a serious face. Just a minute into the briefing, the major has already checked off several objectives that are so great in their scope as military achievements that I feel stunned at the magnitude of the task ahead of us.