by Marko Kloos
“You, too,” I say and sit up from my uncomfortably reclined position.
The cop closes the compartment door again and moves on down the train car, and I try to shake off the remnants of the dream. Outside, the landscape is dark. The information display at the front of the compartment shows that we’re traveling along the shore of Lake Erie at 307 kilometers per hour.
I meant to take the train to Fort Shughart, for lack of another location on this side of dark country that has any relevance to me, but I decide to get off the train at the next stop, grab some chow, and see if I can hitch a ride into orbit from the base at Cleveland or Great Lakes. Whatever is happening at Shughart right now, there’s nothing there for me after all this time, and nostalgic sightseeing in the 365th’s old company building probably won’t do anything to improve the quality of my dreams.
CHAPTER 6
FLEET YARD DAEDALUS
When I reach Gateway in yet another packed shuttle two days later, I have a rough idea of what to expect of my new command. The new ships have been top secret since they started construction on them not too long after the Second Battle of Mars, which naturally means that everybody in the corps knows about them. But as fast as news travels in the enlisted underground, the information often gets distorted and altered as it travels down the rumor chain, like in that old children’s game. Halley and I have the advantage of experience, and we’ve both come to conclude that the new ships are an evolution of the battleships that performed so well at Mars, even if we lost one of them to propulsion system damage. Three years aren’t enough to come up with a new design from scratch and get it operational. So our money is on improved Agincourt-class ships, hopefully with more reliable particle cannons and less vulnerable fusion engines.
The sergeant who checks my orders at the transfer desk sends me to a docking collar that’s not too far from the one where my earlier shuttle from Earth arrived, which means it’s not in the capital ship section of the station.
“Are you sure about this, Sarge?” I say. “I’m pretty sure my new boat is a cap ship.”
He scans my PDP’s code again and looks at his terminal.
“The computer says it’s right, sir. Says you’re going over to CAS on Luna. I’m guessing you’ll catch your final ride up there.”
CAS is the Combat Aviation School, where Halley taught for a few years as a drop ship flight instructor. I raise an eyebrow and take my PDP back from the desk sergeant.
“Guess I’ll find out. Thank you, Sergeant.”
The ship at my assigned docking collar is another shuttle, the standard Fleet utility variety used for orbital transport, so I know the next leg of my trip won’t be a long one. This shuttle isn’t nearly as full as the one from Earth to Gateway. I have a whole row of seats to myself, and when the hatch closes and the docking collar retracts, no more than a quarter of the other seats are full. My fellow passengers are mostly Fleet pilots in flight suits, which makes sense if we’re going to CAS on Luna. There are two SI officers in the shuttle as well, sitting near the front of the ship and talking quietly among themselves. I get out my PDP and kill some time reading news and sending Halley an update on my destination and ETA, just in case she’s still on Luna.
The flight from Gateway to lunar orbit only takes about an hour and a half—forty-five minutes of acceleration burn, and then the same amount of time for deceleration, with the nose of the shuttle flipped around and pointed back at Gateway and Earth. Then we flip again for the slow coast into the Fleet base at Luna, a sprawling complex of building domes housing half a dozen schools where new Fleet personnel get their first taste of low- and zero-g environments.
The shuttle doesn’t dock at the main transport hub. Instead, it descends into the hangar cluster of the Fleet’s Combat Aviation School. I’ve been here a lot because our joint living quarters were near the CAS dome, but I’ve only been in the hangar of the flight school once, over three years ago at the start of the Battle of Earth, when a Lanky seed ship was headed our way and we needed a few dozen drop ships to lift troops to safety from the deck of NACS Regulus.
The shuttle docks in one of the many bays at the CAS hangar, and a few minutes later, we are in pressurized atmosphere on the main flight deck. When I step off the shuttle and onto the well-worn deck, I have a slightly disorienting feeling of déjà vu. A little over three years ago, a contingent of SI troopers from Regulus stormed out of a drop ship and commandeered pilots and ships right off this deck, and I got punched in the face by my then girlfriend. We got married back on Regulus just a few hours later, with a Lanky seed ship approaching Earth and everybody preparing for a last-ditch defense. Those were far more desperate days—we had no reliable weapon against seed ships back then—but I’ve never felt more alive than I did that night.
The flight deck doesn’t look much different from the way it did three years ago. It’s still crammed full of Fleet drop ships and attack birds of every model currently in service and a few I haven’t seen in the Fleet in years. But it’s not the Wasps and Dragonflies that catch my eye. In the middle of the hangar, four strange-looking drop ships are hooked up to refueling probes and service links. I can tell they are evolutions of the Dragonfly design, like the Dragonfly-SR models we use to flush out Lankies on Mars. But these look weightier somehow, with added bulges and domes where the other Dragonflies have smooth hull plating. The wings are thicker and stubbier, the nose turrets don’t have the usual rotary autocannon sticking out of them, and I can see the telltale zits of optical sensors all over the hull.
But the design changes aren’t the most striking thing about these new Dragonfly mutations. It’s the paint that really makes them look out of place, a bright shade of orange that is almost fluorescent. And as if someone decided the hull paint isn’t enough to make them stand out, they also have illuminated light strips on the hull. It’s like the designers read the manual on how to make a ship stealthy and then made these birds exactly the opposite. The Blackfly version we rode in three years ago on Arcadia was a smaller, more agile, stealthier ship than the Dragonfly. These things take the opposite evolutionary approach. They are bigger, bulkier, and look like they’re about half again as heavy.
The PDP in my pocket buzzes, and I retrieve it to check the incoming message.
>What’s your status?
>On the hangar deck at CAS.
>I’m on base too. Stay put. I’ll come and fetch you.
I didn’t expect to see her again so soon, and her message makes me grin. I knew her next stop was Luna as well, and there aren’t too many ways to get off the moon again, so there was a 30 percent chance we would leave for our next duty stations from the same spot. But I thought her long on the way to her ship, and I’m happy for the chance to see her again. There’s the possibility that we got assigned to the same unit again, and the likelihood just went up considerably. But the “Duty Station” field on my orders is still just a numeric code instead of a ship name, standard procedure for assignments that have any degree of secrecy attached. I stay where I am, twenty meters away from the shuttle that is now getting serviced for the return trip to Gateway, and study the new drop ships some more. They have no squadron markings or ship name on their tails. Overall, that flight of drop ships looks like they just rolled them off the assembly floor at the factory this morning. I strongly suspect that those ships and I are headed for the same destination.
Halley appears on the far end of the flight deck a few minutes later. She is wearing her flight suit, and she carries her pilot helmet under one arm. I watch her as she strides across the deck with purpose and confidence, completely in her element and comfortable with her environment. She loves being in that suit, loves having a battle-ready spacecraft in front of her, and even with a year of training raw recruits under my belt, I feel like I’ve only started to understand how much of a purgatory it was for her to be serving in classrooms and simulators for so long instead of being on the frontlines.
“I thought you were already off to y
our XO gig,” I say in greeting when she reaches me.
“I was,” she says. “Been going back and forth ferrying new hardware to the ship.”
“What ship?”
“You’ll see,” she says with a smile.
She nods to the new drop ships I’ve been studying for the last few minutes.
“What do you think of the new babies?”
“I don’t know what to think. Never seen that class before.”
“They’re Dragonfly-HVs. We’ve been driving two squadrons’ worth of them from deck to deck. These are the last flight. Thirty-two ships in total.”
“Deck to deck,” I repeat. “So we’re on a carrier again.”
“You’ll see,” she says again. “Patience, Captain Grayson. Wouldn’t want to violate OPSEC.”
“Oh, come on. It’s not like they kept those new ships a great secret.”
“All I’m saying is don’t believe the rumor mill too much.” She nods toward the orange drop ships. “Want to go for a ride?”
“What in the fuck is a Dragonfly-HV? Or is that classified too?”
Halley starts walking over to the flight of drop ships, and I follow her.
“HV is for hi-viz. You may have noticed the loud paint job.”
“Yeah. That’ll stand out on the battlefield like a neon sign.”
“That’s the point, Andrew. They even have external light markers. To make ’em as obvious as possible through, say, high-magnification optics from orbit.”
“That sounds like a great way to commit suicide by enemy fire.”
“Depends on what you’re up against,” she says.
From close up, the new drop ships look even more imposing. They lack the sleek angles of the Blackflies, but their extra bulk gives them a solid tanklike aura of indestructibility. Of course, I know from experience that no drop ship is indestructible—far from it—but these look like they can take a massive beating and keep flying.
“Who’s slotted to fly 505, Sarge?” Halley asks the crew chief, who is supervising the refueling and flight prep.
“Lieutenant Garcia, ma’am,” the chief answers.
“I’ll take 505 out to the barn myself. Tell Lieutenant Garcia to left-seat on 507 with Lieutenant Leach.”
“You need a left-seater, Major?”
“Negative,” Halley says. “I’m letting Captain Grayson ride shotgun.” She flicks a thumb in my direction.
The crew chief looks at me with some skepticism, and I know roughly what he’s thinking. I’m in Fleet cammies, not a flight suit, and I’m wearing a combat-drop badge instead of pilot wings. I know that Halley isn’t exactly breaking regs by letting me ride up front instead of in the cargo bay, but I also know she’s at least stretching them a little. But the chief probably figures that he’s several pay grades too low to second-guess the squadron XO, because he merely shrugs.
“Three minutes on the fuel, and two more pallets of cargo to go, ma’am. Figure skids up in five if we can get clearance from flight ops early. Shouldn’t be a problem.”
“Very well,” Halley replies. “Let’s see if we can scrounge up a brain bucket for the captain here.”
“You probably have more front seat time than any other Fleet grunt,” Halley says when we strap into our seats. I look for the data and oxygen hookup and connect my flight helmet.
“This is only—what, the third time I’ve been in the cockpit with you?”
“Sounds about right. Let’s see—Willoughby . . . and Earth, three years back.”
“The day we got married.”
“Yeah, it was.” She smiles as she cycles through her displays and goes through the preflight checklist. “But you need to be qualified for that seat if it’s anything but a ferry run or a special VIP tour. Technically, the crew chief needs to remove that stick in front of you before we take off.”
“You’re not going to make him?”
“Nah. Just don’t touch the controls.”
“Not my area of expertise,” I say, remembering the simulated drop ship runs they had me do in boot camp. I burned up every single one of them on atmospheric entry. Whatever Halley does with her ships is some sort of witchcraft, something that my brain isn’t wired to comprehend. To me, trying to coordinate the controls of a drop ship for movement in three dimensions feels like trying to center a greased ball bearing on a dinner plate while running up a flight of stairs.
Behind us, the cargo ramp of the ship closes. I can’t hear the hydraulics through the armored bulkhead behind us, but I can see the video feed from the cargo hold on the center console. When the ramp is closed, Halley listens to something in her headset that I can’t hear. She sends back an acknowledgment and switches channels.
“Flight ops, Dragonfly 505. Request taxi to the active and departure clearance.”
“Dragonfly 505, flight ops. Taxi to launch pad one-six via taxiway Alpha Charlie. Hold on launch pad and contact flight ops for automated launch clearance.”
“Taxi to pad one-six via Alpha Charlie and hold for auto clearance, Dragonfly 505,” Halley replies with the smooth routine of someone who has gone through exchanges like this thousands of times.
“You’re still not telling me where you’re taking this thing.”
“And spoil the fun? Hell no. Just sit tight and enjoy the ride, Andrew.”
We launch out of the CAS hangar a few minutes later. Even though I usually tap into a drop ship’s sensor arrays when I am riding in the back, it’s much more fun to sit up front and see the scenery through the cockpit windows. We climb away from the surface of the moon and the sprawl of the military base complex. Lunar orbit is a busy place, and Halley has several exchanges with space traffic control directing her onto departure lanes and alerting her to nearby traffic. Then we’re away from the military bases and heading for the lunar horizon, which always seems just within grasp. Above the curve of the lunar surface, the blue-gray hemisphere of Earth pokes up, covered as usual in swirling cloud patterns. But instead of heading out in that direction, Halley banks the drop ship to port and starts a low orbit around Luna.
“I wonder whether this place would have been a good refuge for humans if the Lankies had managed to get a foothold on Earth,” Halley says.
“What, Luna? It’s just three hundred thousand klicks. A seed ship can make that in an hour or less.”
“Yeah, but there’s no atmosphere here. It’s not terraformable. They don’t seem to want the places that aren’t already set up for them. They can flip an atmosphere and pump CO2 into it. Can’t flip an atmosphere that isn’t there.”
I think about her statement and shrug.
“You’re probably right. But that doesn’t mean they’d tolerate a human outpost in line of sight of their new digs. They’d probably scrape us off Luna just because. Would you want someone peeking over your fence constantly?”
“Shit no,” Halley says. “Those things don’t make good neighbors. Just imagine.”
I look over at Earth, or at least the half of it that’s visible above the lunar horizon, and try to do just that. I imagine an Earth crawling with Lankies—cities empty, human population mostly wiped out, survivors driven underground, and just a few ten thousand of us sitting here on Luna and getting a ringside seat to the extermination of our species. The Lankies wouldn’t be able to land settlers or deploy their nerve-gas pods, but it wouldn’t matter in the long run. All they’d have to do would be to park a few seed ships in lunar orbit and shoot down everything that tried to come or go. Without resupply from Earth or some other colony, everyone on Luna would be dead within a year or two at the most. On the whole, I’d rather get killed on Earth instead of having a ringside seat to the end of civilization while getting a slow execution by gradual asphyxiation.
“This isn’t going to end until they wipe us out, or we kill them all,” I say.
“I have no particular problem with option two,” Halley replies. “It’s not like they’re leaving us much of a choice. They’re not much for live and le
t live.”
“No, they aren’t,” I say. “But we aren’t, either. Not at this point. It’s too much of a grudge match now.”
We leave Earth and the travel lane to Gateway on our starboard side. Halley continues her low orbit of the moon, past CAS and Fleet Base Armstrong, until we are above the undeveloped part of Luna, the edge of the desirable lunar real estate that faces Earth. I’ve only been around the far side in windowless shuttles or drop ship cargo holds, and this is the first time I actually get to see this part of Luna from a low-orbit vantage point.
“Over there,” Halley says, pointing, sometime after we’ve swung around to the far side.
“Is that Daedalus?”
“That’s it. You can’t see the installation until you clear the rim of the crater. It’s three klicks high.”
Daedalus is the name for both the one-hundred-kilometer crater in the center of the far side of Luna and the radio telescope we put there fifty years ago. Over here, the facility is shielded from the radio waves coming from Earth, the ideal site for a set of big electronic ears to point away from Earth. Over the years, they expanded the complex to hold an optical surveillance array and various scientific labs, but because it’s not a military base, we have no business there, and very few corps members ever get to see the place in person. We don’t get close enough to the crater for me to see the whole facility, but I can see the top of the radio telescope array at our closest point of approach.
“Can’t cross over Daedalus,” Halley says. “They get pissed off when we contaminate their quiet sky with radio chatter. Besides, that’s not where we’re going.”
She looks up and slightly over to starboard and points.
“That is.”
I follow the direction of her index finger and let out a low whistle.
“What the fuck?”
“Yeah, that was my first reaction, too.”
Up in the lunar sky, a few hundred kilometers from Daedalus and quietly hanging in the black of space, a station is orbiting the far side of the moon. It’s hard to tell scale from our angle, but it’s larger than Gateway, although far less bulky. It’s an almost graceful-looking structure in the shape of two mirrored letter Es joined at their spines. I’ve seen this type of structure twice before—at the renegade deep-space fleet yard where they built Agincourt and Arkhangelsk, and at Arcadia. It’s a capital ship fleet yard, and the ships docked on the tines of the double-E shape are as capital as they come.