by Marko Kloos
The scene outside is apocalyptic. I tap into the ship’s cameras with tired fingers, using my combat-controller access one more time in regulation-skirting fashion, and almost wish I had remained ignorant about what’s going on down on the surface. The Lankies are flooding into the spaceport on all sides, only held back in some spots by cannon fire from automatic sentry guns set up to cover the retreat of the last infantry troops. The Shrikes escorting us are making attack runs into the surging enemy crowd, dropping dozens with cannon shells and blowing more of them apart with wing-launched missiles, but already it’s like trying to put out a bonfire with half a cup of water.
On the plains beyond the spaceport, where Sergeant Crawford and I battled the Lankies on our ride back from Tuttle 250, many more are coming out of holes in the ground that I know weren’t there when we set out for the Tuttle 250 rescue. I never thought we’d be able to kill every last Lanky on Mars, but seeing more of them on the surface than we ever saw when we still had our full combat strength is disheartening and demoralizing. The cruisers don’t have the nukes or the kinetic warheads to kill all of these new Lankies. And knowing how long it took just to train the troops we just lost, I know that we’d need twenty years of boot-camp cycles to get enough boots on the ground to stand a chance. Whatever the next phase of this fight will look like, we’ll have to think of an entirely new angle to take.
In the distance, I can see the blinding spheres of nuclear detonations. The fleet got the word, and they are dropping all the nukes they have onto the Lanky “settlements.” If every single one of them is a buried seed ship under construction—growing perhaps?—we can’t afford to leave a single site untouched. But I take some grim satisfaction out of the knowledge that if we have to come up with new tactics, so do they, because they can’t rely on the overwhelming advantage of those seed ships anymore.
I lie down on the rubber-lined deck of the Dragonfly between rows of strange SI troopers in filthy and dusty uniforms, and I find that I wasn’t even aware of how tired my body is until I let all my muscles relax. And even with all the chaos thousands of feet below me, with the uncertainty of the orbital ascent and the nuclear strikes lighting up the surface of Mars, I find myself drifting off to exhausted sleep.
I don’t wake up again until we’re on the flight deck of NACS Polaris an hour later.
I spend the next half day wasting time on the carrier with decontamination, grabbing chow, and getting a fresh set of fatigues from the supply division. The flight deck is packed nose-to-ass with people and equipment, but unlike on the trip to Mars, nothing is neat or orderly. The emergency dustoff happened so quickly that the crews had no time for organization. The drop ships loaded us up and dumped us wherever they had space, and it takes the three of us six hours to catch a ride on a drop ship that’s transporting Phalanx personnel back to their own ship. I look around in the cargo hold on the short trip over to Phalanx, but I don’t see anyone else from the SOCOM detachment other than Dmitry and Lieutenant Stahl, and my heart sinks a little. The MilNet is off-line, and TacLink is hopelessly overloaded and chaotic. I try to get a message through to Halley, but the network is so slow that even the failure notification takes thirty minutes to get back to me. Fighting against awful odds on the surface is one thing, but being stuck in orbit on a warship in near chaos, with no way to communicate with your wife or even check on her whereabouts, is a thousand times worse.
Back on Phalanx, I report in with the CO, even though there’s nothing I want more right now than a private shower in my stateroom in Grunt Country and twenty-four straight hours of sleep. Colonel Yamin is in CIC with Major Masoud, who regards me with an expression that almost looks like paternalistic concern.
“We got our asses kicked,” I conclude after I give my version of events.
“How do you figure, Lieutenant?” Major Masoud says.
“We’ll never get them off Mars. They’re underground now. They figured out how we fight, and they adopted countermeasures. It would take ten times the troops we had today, and we’d still lose half of them if we went down into the tunnels and flushed them out. Greenland was enough for me, sir.”
“Tactically, we have a stalemate on Mars,” Major Masoud agrees. “But we achieved almost all of our objectives. We rescued five thousand civilians, Lieutenant. Every holdout installation except for one. And we never needed to take all of Mars, just deny its use to the Lankies.”
“If those underground seed ships make it into orbit, they’ll have twice as many as before, sir. I’d bet that every settlement down there is really a seed ship. And I’ve seen other stuff . . .”
My voice trails off when I think of the Lankies carrying the dead bodies of our SI troopers back to their tunnels. Maybe some of them were even still alive. And we won’t ever be able to go back and rescue them, or recover any bodies.
“We are leaving a garrison fleet in orbit,” Major Masoud says. “The cruisers are taking on more ammunition as soon as the next wave of supply ships gets here. They are nuking all the Lanky sites they can find right now. I’m sure that in the next few days, they’ll nuke them all a few times over. The fight isn’t won yet, but by God, we haven’t lost here. We made them bleed.”
He looks at me and points to the CIC hatch.
“Go take care of yourself, Lieutenant Grayson. I don’t want to see you out and about for another forty-eight hours. We will have plenty of time for a thorough debriefing on the way back to Earth. Clean up, eat, and get some sleep. We won a great victory today.”
“Yes, sir,” I say. This is the first order Major Masoud has ever given me where I don’t feel like I’m being pulled around by marionette strings, and I don’t utter a word of dissent.
There are things I have to take care of before I even fix myself. Back in Grunt Country, which is empty except for my Russian and Euro comrades who are already in their bunks, I go into my stateroom and turn on the neural-networks terminal. My personal message box is just the way I left it, with only two new messages on top of the read stack. One is from my mother’s privileged-dependent account, and the other is from Gunny Philbrick. I check the time stamp of Philbrick’s message and see that it’s from today. I don’t need to open it to know that he’s okay, and if Humphrey or Nez got killed down on Mars, I don’t want to know right now anyway. But there’s no message from Halley, and I know she would have sent one if she had made it back from the surface already.
I fire off a message to her account to let her know that I’m okay, and tell her to reply the second she gets into network range again. We don’t even have casualty lists out yet—everything is still in fresh postbattle chaos—and the pleasure of a hot shower and a clean bunk is tempered by my anxiety. I don’t know if my wife is still alive, in the cockpit of a drop ship ferrying soldiers up to their carrier, or maybe holed up on the surface of Mars somewhere, waiting for a rescue that won’t come. I don’t want to contemplate her death, or the myriad ways in which she may have died down there, but my brain serves up a few of those anyway.
We won a great victory today, Major Masoud said to me in CIC. But I don’t feel like we won a great victory. I feel like we went up in the ring against an evenly matched opponent, and we both took turns beating the living shit out of each other and left the ring without a clear winner.
I don’t hear anything from Halley on the entire weeklong ride back from Mars to Gateway Station.
I log into my data terminal compulsively about fifty times every day, even though I have a PDP in my pocket that will relay the same messages to me, just so I don’t have to wait for the wireless delay if a message does come in. But for a week straight, my inbox stays empty except for meaningless fleet bullshit and a few messages from my old friend Gunny Philbrick, who dropped into LZ Blue with Humphrey and Nez as his squad leaders. Humphrey is still alive but earned her third Purple Heart from friendly-fire shrapnel. Nez is gone, killed in action while trying to hold back a Lanky counteroffensive with a squad of green SI troopers, who all died to the last
man and woman.
I know that Dmitry made one of the last flights out, because we were on the same Dragonfly. He took a shuttle over to the SRA carrier a few hours later, sparse with his good-byes in what I now know to be typical Russian brevity. I do wonder if Maksim survived the battle. As rock hard as Dmitry is, I feel that the loss of Maksim would wound him more than any Lanky ever could, and I hope the best for my new friend and his spouse.
In those cheesy military flicks on the Networks, things would have gone differently. I would have dropped with my wife in the cockpit of my drop ship and all my friends and comrades by my side, and we would have fought together. We would have taken some losses, friends dying in heroic last stands and giving profound last statements, and it would have all taught us something about duty and sacrifice and the futility of war. But this is real life. In a real war, you drop into battle with troops you’ve never met before, and your spouse is deployed thousands of kilometers away from you. In real battle, good people die fast and awful deaths, and terrible people make it out unscathed. Dozens of civilians die at the moment of their long-awaited rescue because an officer makes a bad split-second call, and then that officer dies with those civvies and never even gets a chance to regret his mistake.
In a real war, the enemy can take a savage beating and then turn the tables on you in an hour to force a bloody stalemate even though you’ve each killed thousands on the other side. Tires blow, batteries die, vital shots miss their target, and unlikely shots score almost-impossible bull’s-eyes. When I was young and impressionable, I thought of war as a sort of romantic crucible, a test of one’s manhood and mettle. In reality, it’s merely a challenge to one’s ability to stay sane.
But we will be back, again and again, as long as it takes until either we get wiped out or we annihilate them. Because just like the Lankies, we, too, are a species who just doesn’t seem to know when it is beaten.
EPILOGUE
When the fleet returns to Gateway a week after Mars, the civilian fleet in Earth orbit repeats their earlier gesture for us. They line the approaches to the space station and blink their lights in synchronicity, to show their gratitude for what we did for the planet. I want to feel appreciation as I watch the honor salute on the external camera feed on the screen in my stateroom, but all I can think of is that Halley would have enjoyed seeing this, and that the last message I ever typed to her was right after seeing the same honor display when we departed Gateway. We all have shore leave now—technically for thirty days, but it’s understood that no brass is going to jump anyone’s shit for overstaying their leave this time around. I’ve never felt such a profound level of mental and physical fatigue before, a deep and aching tiredness that goes beyond a lack of sleep or a hard-fought battle.
I’d spent most of that week clutching my PDP and waiting for the incoming message signal to buzz. I sent Halley a message every day. At first, they were just requests, then pleas to get in touch with me. By the third day, I was writing her longer messages, detailing the stuff we’re going to do together once we’re back home, knowing full well that she may never read what I wrote.
Now that we are back, we have many after-battle briefings where everyone brings everyone else up to speed. The task force got off relatively light in space—we lost the priceless Agincourt, of course, but rescued most of her crew, and only one space control cruiser and an older frigate were lost to Lanky mines during the operation.
We only lost one member of our SOCOM team—the Spaceborne Rescueman, Lieutenant Paquette. He jumped into a drop-ship crash site and defended two wounded pilots and a dead crew chief against six Lankies and took down two before they overwhelmed the site. Word has it that Brigade is going to put him in for the Medal of Honor. All the Russians survived the battle and transferred to the carrier Minsk a day after our departure. I have grown fond of Dmitry, and I’m glad that he gets to go home and see his husband, Maksim, again, which makes the uncertainty about Halley’s fate even more painful than it is already. There are a lot of dog tags to sort out, and there’s a long list of names of troopers whose tags aren’t officially collected but whose whereabouts are unknown. With so many brigades dispersed over so many ships, it’ll take days to sort out everything—at least that’s what I tell myself.
Twenty thousand SI troopers and SOCOM troops dropped onto Mars. Eleven thousand five hundred returned, and almost two thousand of those are wounded. Four thousand nine hundred are confirmed dead, and another three thousand six hundred are missing and presumed killed. On the opposing side, the Lankies got it much worse. We killed over ten thousand in direct combat, and God only knows how many when we nuked every single “settlement” seed-ship location from orbit at the end of the battle. They lost their entire fleet above Mars, and while there are suspected to be two or three stragglers out there patrolling the Alcubierre nodes, they haven’t approached Mars or bothered the garrison fleet that’s keeping an eye on things from above. We rescued eighteen different holdout shelters all over Mars and only failed to save the population of a single shelter.
Mars was a write-off from the beginning. The Lanky terraforming would have taken ten to fifteen years to reverse even if we had scraped all the Lankies off the planet. With the radiation from fifty high-yield nukes dropped on the seed-ship building sites, it will take much longer now for Mars to become suitable for life again. We can’t use it anymore—but neither can the Lankies, and that was the objective all along: to take away their operating base in the solar system and remove the direct threat to Earth. They can’t move against us with what they have left on Mars, with no seed ships to threaten Earth, and we have moved back into our respective corners with our noses bleeding and our eyes swollen shut. But I’m sure both our species will be back for the next round once we have caught our breath and nursed our wounds. We’ve pushed each other too far for this to have an indecisive ending. Either we walk away from this, or they do, but there is no room in this universe for both our species as long as they keep coming for what’s ours.
I feel like I’ve left half of me behind on Mars, and I won’t get that part of me back, if at all, until I know for sure where my wife is now and what happened to her. But my PDP is still silent when I gather my things and leave the ship for the lonely shuttle ride back to Earth.
I go down to Liberty Falls, because it’s the only place I can think of being right now, even though Halley isn’t with me. I leave my small kit bag in a locker at the transit station and go for a walk through the town. Winter has arrived, and there’s a layer of snow on the lawns and the sidewalks. Outside the transit station, I step onto the lawn, brush the snow aside with one hand, and then touch the cold and frozen grass underneath, letting my fingers warm it up, remembering what it felt like in the spring and summer. I don’t want to go to Chief Kopka’s place just yet, because I don’t want to see their faces when I walk in without my wife and they will know without me having to say a word. Instead, I walk through the town center and over to the little waterfall that gave the town its name. It’s not overly impressive, just a six-foot cascade dropping over an artificial ledge prettied up with river stones, but it’s a peaceful spot, and Halley liked it.
I stand on the little wooden bridge and look out over the river, the waterfall murmuring softly behind me, and I realize that I have no idea what I will do with the rest of my life if Halley is gone from it. I have a promise to keep to the Lazarus Brigades, to train their troops for a year and a half, and I’ll have to resign my commission to keep that promise. But that’s not something I have to do today, or tomorrow, or even next week. I take the military-issue PDP out of my pocket and turn it in my hands. It’s the electronic leash that can summon me back to service any time, but I’m tired of heeding its call, and if that’s all I have left in life, it’s not much of a life at all.
With its smooth edges and its shopworn finish, the PDP itself looks like a river stone. I remember how many good and bad messages I got on that tiny little black-and-white screen, and I realize how
many more of them were bad than good.
I want to pitch the PDP into the river. I want to be done with the life to which this device has me tied. And right now, with my wife missing and the tiredness in my bones seemingly permanent, I have to fight that urge more than usual. The military has given me a measure of self-determination, but also a lifetime of bad memories and an endless source for horrible dreams. But it has also brought Halley into my life, and I know that despite the sadness and exhaustion I feel right now, I’d do it all over again just because of that bunk assignment in boot-camp platoon 1066.
The buzz of an incoming message tickles my palm. I stare at the screen for a moment and consider pitching the thing into the drink anyway. Then I turn the device on and read the message on the screen.
>Still kicking.
It’s not signed, and doesn’t need to be.
The sudden joy and profound relief I feel makes the load I’ve been carrying for the last week roll off my shoulders in the span of a single long breath. I smile and slip the PDP back into my pocket. Then I close my eyes and breathe in the cold and clean winter air of Vermont. And just like that, it smells like home again.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Reduced to the basics, writing a novel is basically just one person sitting in a chair for many hours and writing many words until they can tack THE END onto the bottom of the manuscript. In reality, so many people have a hand in the making of a novel, from the first idea to the time the reader gets to turn to Page One, that the byline should be several paragraphs long.