by Marko Kloos
“Sure,” Dr. Saults says.
“On our first long leave together, we stayed at a friend’s place in Vermont, out in the country. First few days of the leave, I had trouble falling asleep because it was too damn quiet. No engine noise. No 1MC announcements. No boots tromping around on the deck.”
“I have the opposite problem,” Dr. Saults says. “I have to put in earplugs and turn on the haptic alert on the bunk. Otherwise I’ll be up for two hours after rack time.”
“Get out while you can,” I say. “I mean it. Do your minimum time to pay them back for your psych degree, then get the hell out. Before you end up living your whole life in watch cycles. Before they have their hooks in you so firmly that your only option is to keep re-upping.”
“Why does it sound like I’m the one getting counseling here?” Dr. Saults says with a smile.
“It’s not counseling. It’s friendly advice. Relaying experience.”
“I appreciate the advice,” she says. “But I don’t plan on doing this forever. I want to go back home and work in pediatric support. I did, in fact, join for the free degree.”
“No shame in that. I joined to get out of the PRC. That’s why the corps never had a problem with recruitment before the Lankies. No shortage of PRC rats trying to move up.”
Dr. Saults is a second lieutenant, which is the standard rank for new doctors joining the Fleet after med school. It also means that she has less than two years of active service, which in turn means that she has never been on a ship in combat ops against the Lankies. She’s never even seen one outside of Network or MilNet footage.
“I don’t have any problem sleeping anymore,” I say, to steer the conversation back on comfortable ground for this green medical officer. “In the Fleet or down on Earth. In fact, I’m always tired. I could go and hit the rack right now for a nap, and I’d be out in two minutes flat. But I have some trouble controlling my anger these days. It’s like I’m always pissed off about something, and it doesn’t need much of a spark to light my fuse.”
“Since you got back from your tour with the Brigades, you mean.”
“Yeah.”
“Why do you think that is?” Dr. Saults asks. She’s back in her therapist mode, probably glad she can go through her psych-school script of mental-health evals.
“I’m not sure. I mean, I worked on detached duty for eighteen months. I had two Fleet officers with me, but I was the ranking team member. The next person I had to answer to was a thousand miles away in an office at Norfolk. And then I got back, and they stuck me on combat patrols over Mars for two deployments, back to back. Have you been on a ship assigned to orbital garrison, Lieutenant?”
“No, I haven’t,” she says. “I did my residency down at Great Lakes. But Ottawa is my first space deployment.”
“Oh, man. No wonder you still need earplugs,” I say.
I lean forward, plant my elbows on the desk in front of me, and rub my eyes.
“Orbital garrison duty is the pits. If you manage to get yourself assigned to a ship bound for Mars, you’ll be busier than a mess cook at dinnertime. Eight-hour patrols in terrible weather, and we’re flying over what’s left of the biggest colony we’ve ever had. We get a decontamination session after every patrol because the planet is so radioactive now from all the nukes we used that it practically glows on its own. We see Olympus City on some low-level passes, and every time I remember what it used to look like, and it makes me want to puke. I try not to think of how many millions died down there. How many were used as protein chains for those fucking seed ships they were building all along.” I pause and down the rest of my coffee, which is still hot enough to make the action uncomfortable.
“And we do that every fucking day. For months. Sometimes we get to kill a Lanky or two from the air. Sometimes I get to call down another strike, kinetic or nuke. Fuck the place up even more. Go back to the carrier, decon, debrief, take a shower, grab some chow, go to sleep. Get up the next morning, and do it again. And most of the time, I’m just staring at a screen and getting bumped around in the shittiest weather you’ve ever seen. Boring the shit out of myself, logging flight hours over an irradiated graveyard.”
The concern on Dr. Saults’s face is the most genuine I’ve seen since we started our talk.
“If you’ve done that for two deployments in a row, I can understand your mental state one hundred percent.”
I very much doubt that, I think, but nod anyway.
“Have you tried antidepressants? They usually work well for PTSD-related symptoms.”
“I was on pills for over a year. From just after the Battle of Earth until just after the Arcadia run.”
“And did you feel they helped?”
“Some,” I say. “I think it was mainly because I thought they would. But I used them too often, and I washed them down with liquor. They made me feel kind of lethargic. Like I had no energy left, emotionally. And I didn’t want to keep going down that route. So I stopped taking them.”
“There’s new medication out now that works much better and doesn’t have the side effects,” Dr. Saults says. “I’d like you to try it out.”
She turns her attention to her screen and taps in a few entries.
“In my professional opinion, you have PTSD, which is common among frontline personnel.” She looks at me again and smiles curtly.
“My unofficial opinion is that you also have a massive case of burnout, which is even more common among combat troops that have been in for as long as you have. I’ll send a scrip for you to the ship pharmacy. That’ll help you in the short term.”
She smiles again, but this one is a wry sort of smile that looks a bit out of place on her young face.
“And for the long term, you should probably take the advice you just gave me. Think about getting out while you can. Before you end up needing those meds and that liquor just to function. Or before you don’t listen to your wife and actually do take someone’s head off with a mess tray.”
I fake a sheepish smile and get out of my chair. Dr. Saults thinks she’s seen enough of my mental state to take a stab at a fix, but I haven’t given her a glimpse of the really fucked-up areas in my head yet. I know that if I did, she wouldn’t put me on meds; she’d have me committed or push for a medical discharge from the corps.
I leave Dr. Saults’s office and walk to the end of the passageway. Then I check my shiny, new transparent PDP for directions to the pharmacy. It’s on the same deck, five frames forward and three compartments to starboard. The elevator bank that will take me back to my office is nine frames back, the opposite direction from the pharmacy.
I think for a moment. Then I tuck the PDP away and turn around to head to the elevators. I’d rather be anxious and awake than relaxed but drugged up with whatever wonder chemical they cooked up now to keep the cogs in their machine running smoothly.
But as I stand in front of the elevator bank a minute later, I realize that I’m already thinking about that allotted drink tonight and that I’ll just try to take the edge off with something else. And one day, I’ll either try to work a spaceborne landing while half-drunk, or I’ll bash the skull of someone like Captain Beals into a bulkhead. There are plenty of Arcadians on this ship—troops who were part of that treason, but who have been given a chance at redemption during Mars and who are now at least no longer outcasts. Not to the rest of the corps, anyway. But I lost men and women, almost lost my wife, and I won’t ever fully forgive and forget.
That’s not you, Andrew, Halley had said when she read me the riot act after the incident with Beals.
When the elevator door opens, I don’t get in. Instead, I turn around to go back to the pharmacy, to pick up whatever Dr. Saults prescribed. If it nudges me back toward the way I was before even a little, it’ll be worth the try. And if it doesn’t, I have a private sink in my stateroom that will send those meds right to the ship’s recyclers. But I know I want to reduce the chances that my wife will ever look at me again with the same d
isapproval as she did just an hour ago outside of that wardroom.
CHAPTER 10
EARTH TO TITAN
The SOCOM detachment on Ottawa consists of two teams. One is the SEAL team, sixteen men led by Captain Rolson. The other is my special tactics team, made up of eight combat controllers and eight Spaceborne Rescuemen. My second-in-command, Lieutenant Brown, is in charge of the PJs, as the Spaceborne Rescuemen are nicknamed for reasons that are a little fuzzy and have something to do with their nucleus as airborne rescue medics in the old US military. I’m in charge of the entire team, but I’m also the operational leader of the combat controllers. I know that this is the standard organizational setup for an STT in a SOCOM detachment on a carrier, but I still can’t shake a feeling of inadequacy as I walk into the briefing room for the first STT briefing on this deployment. There are seventeen men and women sitting in the chairs of a briefing room that could hold fifty, and I get a little pang of worry when I see just how small the STT is compared to the SI complement on Ottawa. But even though we are almost useless without the SI’s firepower behind us, the SI can’t do their jobs without SOCOM.
Lieutenant Brown calls the room to attention when I step through the hatch. I could issue an “As you were,” but I let him do the full report and announce that the STT is complete and ready for briefing as ordered. The first meeting sets the tone for a command, and I don’t want to appear too casual. I’ve commanded more troops before—the platoon for Arcadia numbered almost forty SI troopers—but these are all relatively seasoned troops in an extremely demanding occupational specialty. No matter what their rank, nobody in this briefing room has spent less than two years training before being assigned to an operational command.
“Thank you, Lieutenant,” I say when Lieutenant Brown has finished the formality. “Have a seat, ladies and gentlemen.”
Everyone takes their seats again, and I walk up to the lectern at the front of the room and pull out my PDP to glance at the unit roster.
“I am Captain Grayson,” I say. “I will be your CO for this deployment. You all know we will be the STT for the Seventh Spaceborne Infantry Regiment and the Fifth and Eleventh Assault Transport Squadrons. That’s twelve hundred troopers and sixty-four drop ship crew counting on us to not fuck up when the hammer drops.”
The STT troopers look at me attentively. When we go into battle, the combat controllers will do their regular job of jumping in with the first wave and calling down air and orbital support. The job of the Spaceborne Rescuemen is to pod-launch in whenever a drop ship goes down, to patch up survivors and defend them against threats before the SAR flight can lift them out. Of the two jobs, Spaceborne Rescue has the slightly longer and harder training track, and the men and women in this room don’t carry enough body fat between them to fill up a coffee cup if you suctioned it out of them. The lowest-ranked member of the group is a combat controller staff sergeant, and the highest-ranked ones are two master sergeants, one from each occupational specialty.
“This one is a new one, even for me. Looks like the combat controller team is getting a permanent station in CIC,” I continue. “It’s called Tactical Operations, and it will be staffed by a qualified combat controller at all times. We will work out a watch rotation for everyone to make sure that every red hat in this group gets equal time in that chair. The hardware is all new and shiny, but the software is the same we’re all used to. So it’ll be like running a big admin deck from a cushy seat.”
One of the combat controllers raises a hand.
“Sir, there’s eight of us. With the watch cycle, we’re going to get our schedules all out of sync within five days.”
“There’s nine of us,” I say. “I don’t exempt myself from the rotation. Don’t get me wrong—I’ll swap one of you into that CIC seat on the fly if I have to pay attention to something else, but we’re splitting the rotation nine ways.”
I see approving nods from the combat controller section. I am a red hat by training, but as a special tactics officer, I’m not strictly a combat controller anymore because that’s an occupational specialty reserved for enlisted personnel. But I’ve spent so much time wearing the scarlet beret when I was enlisted that it’s hard to think myself as above these guys, even though I am four pay grades above the highest-ranking one of them and get to eat in a wardroom instead of a mess.
“Here’s how it’s going to go. This is a shakedown cruise, not a combat deployment. We’re doing joint training with the whole team whenever we can. As most of you have probably discovered already, this luxury barge has everything you’re used to from a shore installation. We have dedicated PT facilities, a shooting range just for SOCOM, and our own TacLink simulator with combat controller software. The CCT will get up to speed on the new hardware and rotate through the battlespace control station in CIC. The PJs will do whatever it is you guys do for training. I’ll leave that up to Lieutenant Brown, but I assume it involves running that mile-long PT track with an anvil under each arm.”
The troops in the room laugh.
“Only one anvil, but held at arm’s length,” Lieutenant Brown corrects me from the first row, and the team laughs again. I feel very much at home with this group—they’ve all sweated and bled in training about ten times more than the average SI grunt, and we’re part of a very small club, one with a high mortality rate in combat.
“Word has it we’re doing a large-scale live-fire exercise after we refuel and restock at Titan, if this thing makes it there without major bits falling off unexpectedly. We have at least five weeks until then, so we’ll use that time to make sure that we hit it out of the park. You know the drill. I’ll be sending out the roster for this week shortly, and we’ll get to work. Any questions?”
“Sir, are we going to sim the pod launches or do live ones?” one of the combat controllers asks. She’s the only woman on the team, but she’s taller than half the guys in the room. Her name tape says “LANG, E.,” and she’s wearing staff sergeant stripes.
“They said live-fire, so I am assuming we’ll do live launches, too,” I reply. Sergeant Lang returns a satisfied nod. Simulated pod launches don’t involve any pods at all—you just take a ride in the lead drop ship wave, and the computer determines by algorithm if the simulated pod from the ship made it onto the planet. If the computer says that it didn’t, you get to step off the drop ship and count as a casualty the moment your boots hit the dirt. It’s much cheaper and far less risky than an actual pod launch, but it doesn’t count toward your official drop total, and it’s boring as hell.
“You all know your jobs. Daily orders in this briefing room at 0700. Stay in shape, keep the edge honed, learn the new stuff, and take your downtime when you’re off the clock. But stick to the booze limit if you’re going to drink. We all know there’s no one-drink limit on engineering moonshine, but I want a sharp team. Let’s use the hell out of that fancy running track that goes around the missile silos. Because we all know that the console jockeys on this boat aren’t going to set foot on it.”
I hear a resounding chorus of “Aye, sir!” all over the room.
“All right. Let’s get to it and make use of the transit time. Any issues or questions, you know where to find me or Lieutenant Brown. Dismissed.”
On the Network shows I watched as a kid, the starships always had a bridge with windows on the top or front of the ship. In real life, that’s the dumbest thing you could do to a warship. You don’t need windows because you have optics all over the hull, and polyplast panels would be a weak spot in the armor. More importantly, you’d place the operational heart of the ship at an obvious and vulnerable spot, easily targeted and destroyed by a single rail-gun round or missile hit. On a real warship, there is no bridge, just a combat information center. The CIC is in the middle of the ship, surrounded by as much laminate armor as possible. I’m used to the CIC being like a bunker, an armored citadel with hatches and its own life-support system, but like everything else on this ship, Ottawa’s CIC bucks tradition. The compartm
ent is bigger than the hangar deck on the first frigate I served on. The modular control stations all along the walls of the CIC make the compartment look even bigger than it is. In the other Fleet ships, the consoles are clunky things in heavy shockproof mounts. In this CIC, they are almost graceful-looking minimalist designs with huge transparent screens. There’s the usual command pit with the holotable in the center of the CIC, and a large situational display takes up almost the entire forward bulkhead.
I report to the XO in the command pit and then take over the TacOps station for the first time. It’s plain that the consoles on this ship are brand-new. On this particular station, the touch screens don’t even have fingerprints on them, and I have to remove the protective liner from one of the control surfaces. Then I activate the stations, and the screens in front of me turn on instantly. I have one in the center, two angled ones on the left and right, and one more overhead, mounted to the control station rack and tilted down to face my seat. I’m used to having to wait twenty or thirty seconds while the tactical control system comes fully online because it has to poll information from so many different sources, but this system just jumps into live status as soon as I put my hand down on the control surface for access authorization.
We are not in the middle of a planetary assault, and I have no ground attack craft or drop ships to direct, so I start familiarizing myself with the capabilities of the integrated systems of this ship. Everything I tap into responds with lightning speed. Compared to every ship I’ve served on before, the neural network speed on this thing makes the systems on the older ships feel like working with cans on a string. On the flight deck, most of the drop ships are powered down and their systems cold, but a few of them are hooked up to service umbilicals, and I can tap into their onboard systems in a blink to look at the flight deck from the cameras on their hulls.