Points of Impact

by Marko Kloos

  The first pair of Shrikes from Oscar flight dive down into the fracas and cut loose with their cannons, not wanting to risk friendly-fire hits among the SI from stray missiles. Almost immediately, my comms on squad, platoon, and company channels light up with frenzied warnings.

  “Whoa! Oscar Three, abort!”

  “What the hell is he doing?”

  “TacOps, those were live rounds!”

  On my camera feed, I can see a line of impacts kicking up big geysers of dirt right in front of our southern defensive perimeter, not fifty meters from the nearest friendly position. A second later, a pair of Shrikes zooms through the overhead shot. With the relative boredom of the last few hours, the sudden rush of adrenaline makes me sit up with a jolt.

  “Oscar Three, abort, abort, abort,” Sergeant Graff sends on the TacAir channel. “Be advised that you are firing war shots.”

  The feed from the TacAir channel is on low volume on the overhead speakers, but that transmission makes every head in CIC turn.

  “Who is firing live rounds down there?” the XO asks.

  I toggle into the TacAir channel.

  “Oscar flight, abort. Repeat, abort your attack runs. Hold your fire. Weapons cold. I repeat, weapons cold. Someone in your flight has live ammunition loaded. All attack craft, come to heading zero-nine-zero and climb to ten thousand.”

  Both the XO and Colonel Yamin come rushing over to my station.

  “Who in the hell is firing live rounds?” the XO repeats.

  “Oscar Three has war shots loaded,” I say. “I’ve given abort and hold orders to the whole squadron.”

  “This is not good.” Colonel Yamin leans in to look at my console screens. “Halt the exercise. Make the Shrikes secure their weapons.”

  “Already did, ma’am,” I reply.

  The tactical officer stops the simulation, and the orange icons representing the approaching Lankies disappear from my TacLink screen instantly.

  I switch to the command channel. “All units, this is TacOps. Did that burst hit anyone down there?”

  It takes a few tense seconds for the company commander to reply.

  “That’s a negative, TacOps. But that was a close one. They dug a nice new trench in front of the company line with that cannon.”

  “Copy that. Shrikes have been pulled out. Safe all weapons and stand by.”

  I switch back to the TacAir channel where a dozen concerned Shrike jocks are undoubtedly waiting to find out what the hell is going on.

  “Oscar flight, be advised that ground troops are okay. No casualties on the ground. Just landscaping damage.”

  At least one of the Shrikes in the holding pattern has live ammunition in the magazine for the autocannon, which is a major violation of safety protocols. On all cold exercises like the one we are running right now, the magazines get loaded with practice rounds, which are blue in color and inert except for built-in laser emitters to count hits. In almost ten years of service, I’ve only ever seen live ammo on a cold exercise ground once, and that was in rifle magazines that had been in unchecked pouches on an unlucky trooper’s armor. Nobody got hurt, but the trooper in question still got demoted a rank and reprimanded. If war shots ended up in a Shrike’s gun, at least three pairs of eyes failed to notice them, and three people are in very deep shit right now.

  “Oscar flight, point your guns in a safe direction and check your loads. Oscar Three, hold your fire and keep your weapons on safe.”

  “Affirmative, TacOps,” Oscar Three’s pilot replies. He sounds more than a bit unhappy.

  The remaining Shrikes test their firing cycles one by one. When Oscar Nine fires his weapon, I hear a curse over the TacAir link.

  “Goddammit. TacOps, Oscar Nine. I have war shots loaded, too.”

  “Affirmative. Oscar Nine, safe your weapon.”

  The other Shrikes send their all-clear. I turn to Colonel Yamin.

  “Ma’am, Oscar Three and Nine have live rounds loaded. The rest of the flight has exercise munitions in the magazines.”

  “I want all Shrikes recalled and all drop ships on the ground right now. Have the crew chiefs check the magazines of those cannons. And tell the grunts to check their ammo.”

  “Aye, ma’am.” I relay the CO’s orders to the drop ship wing and both Shrike squadrons in the air.

  Colonel Yamin turns to her second-in-command.

  “XO, send the master-at-arms down to the flight deck with a security detachment, have the chief of the deck pull duty logs, and secure the Shrike maintenance crews responsible for arming Oscar Nine and Oscar Three.”

  The XO walks off to pick up a handset, and I let out a long breath. I haven’t seen if the brig on this ship is nicer than regular Fleet brigs, but I know that at least six wrench spinners are about to find out.

  The safety checks take three hours, and both Shrike squadrons return to the ship to get their magazines emptied and double-checked. By the time everyone has been declared free of live ammunition, the exercise has come to a grinding halt. But we still have a battalion on the ground and a whole drop ship wing with them, so the CO decides to give the go-ahead to continue with half the scheduled units. The tactical station modifies the sim to account for the lack of air support from Shrikes and only half the planned personnel count on the ground. While the troops on the ground are still twiddling their thumbs and waiting for the action to restart, one of my combat controllers, Master Sergeant Garcia, walks into CIC and over to my station. I check the clock on my terminal and find that I am at the end of my watch.

  “Ready to be relieved, sir?”

  “Boy, am I ever,” I say. “You heard the whole commotion earlier, I trust.”

  “Yeah. We were in the drop ship hold for two hours. Not much to do but to listen to radio chatter and check video feeds.”

  “Well, they’ll be restarting the sim in about fifteen, so your arrival is impeccably timed, Sergeant Garcia.” I get out of my seat and take my stainless coffee cylinder out of the cup holder on the side of the console. “All yours.”

  I stretch a little and grimace at the mild pain in my lower back.

  “For fuck’s sake. I went to Combat Controller School so I wouldn’t have to sit on my ass for eight hours at a stretch anymore.”

  Sergeant Garcia gets into the seat and brings up his console layout.

  “Well, sir, I hate to tell you that you got the worst of both worlds now. All the sitting of a console jockey, and all the sweat you had to spend to get the beret.”

  “Tell you what, Sergeant,” I tell Garcia in a low voice. The colonel and her XO are over in the command pit and engrossed in a discussion. “If I ever look like I’m having a good time up here, I want you to drag me down to the flight deck, put a rifle in my hand, and place my ass on the next drop ship to Shitsville.”

  Sergeant Garcia chuckles. “I’ll keep it in mind, sir.”

  CHAPTER 15

  SHORE LEAVE

  The exercise that was planned for one day got extended to three: one for the botched day with the live-fire incident, one for a thorough safety check and briefing, and another for a proper two-battalion exercise. Up until this moment, rumor had it that the CO was pissed enough to cancel the expected twenty-four-hour liberty for the crew on Arcadia, but it seems Colonel Yamin doesn’t want to punish the whole crew for the safety lapses of four maintenance techs. The ships with the live ammunition in their magazines had been pulled from Ready Five status just an hour before the exercise, and the maintenance crews only put practice rounds on the rails and neglected to check the ammo cassettes. Word in the passageways has it that the crew chiefs were too busy distracting themselves by impressing a trainee from Eurocorps. I don’t know if there’s any truth to that rumor, but I do know that the XO gave both maintenance crews a dressing down that could be heard even through the armored bulkheads for twenty frames in either direction.

  Because of the size of Ottawa’s crew complement, liberty must be taken in shifts to make sure that no more than a thi
rd of eligible personnel are away from the ship at any time. Halley and I got assigned to Alpha watch for our twenty-four-hour stretch of fresh air, one of the few perks of serving on the same ship while married. So when the XO announces the liberty schedule, we meet up in the flight deck mess at 0700 for a quick breakfast before the drop ship ride. We are in the uniform of the day, blue and teal as usual. From the way Halley carries herself, I can tell that she would rather be in her flight suit, which is what she wears almost all the time when she’s on duty.

  “Now hear this: liberty to Arcadia for eligible personnel will be in effect at 0900 hours for the Alpha watch. All eligible personnel assigned to liberty watch Alpha who wish to leave the ship for their twenty-four-hour liberty will report to the officer of the deck on the flight deck level by 0830 hours. Announcements for Bravo and Charlie liberty watches will follow at 1900 hours and 0700.”

  “I don’t know why they won’t just let us wear whatever we want,” Halley complains over toast and scrambled eggs.

  “You know why. We’re going to be moving around among civvies, representing the Fleet. Let them look at some pretty new uniforms and give them the feeling that they’re in good hands.”

  “Fuck that. Most of them are still the same people that left the rest of us in the shit three years ago.” She looks down at her blue tunic and smooths out an imaginary wrinkle. “And I wouldn’t go so far as to call these things pretty.”

  “They’re kind of growing on me. The temperature regulation works well. I can’t seem to break a sweat in them. And they don’t crease, no matter what you do to them.”

  “Yes, but I don’t feel very warlike in blue pajamas,” Halley grumbles.

  “Well, the uniform of the day is set. It’s the price you’ll have to pay for some clean air and blue skies.”

  We clean off our plates and return our trays to the recycler rack. Then we make our way to the flight deck to report in to the OOD, the officer of the deck.

  Today’s OOD on duty is a young first lieutenant, junior to both of us in rank, but we salute him first as we report in because the OOD represents the commanding officer’s authority, which means that everyone except the CO is subordinate to him when it comes to reporting onto or off the ship.

  “Permission to go ashore granted,” the OOD says to us, and we grab our day packs and head across the deck marker and onto the flight deck to find our drop ship for the ride down.

  If Halley looked uncomfortable at breakfast in her blueberries, being strapped into a cargo hold jump seat instead of up front in the driver’s seat makes her almost miserable-looking.

  “We’ve been riding in the hold together lots of times down on Earth,” I say when I notice her flexing her hands and looking at the forward bulkhead with a tense expression.

  “Yeah, but that’s different. I don’t fly those things as part of my own job. If I’m on a space-rated drop ship, I want to be in control of the stick.”

  When the drop ship is lifted off the deck by the launch clamps, almost all the seats in the hold are full. I see mostly blue uniforms, but there’s a section in the outer starboard row where half a dozen SI NCOs have clustered together, seeking strength and protection in numbers. The cargo hold is alive with the din of many low-volume conversations, which all simultaneously get louder when the pilot turns on the drop ship’s engines.

  “Commonwealth Defense Corps Holiday Cruise Lines,” Halley says. “Now accepting passengers for exciting off-world excursions.”

  “Eat authentic Fleet chow. Tour a battlefield. Pet a Lanky,” I continue her pitch, and she laughs.

  “At least we get paid for this,” she replies. “Eventually. If we’re lucky.”

  We touch down on the airfield at the Midland settlement. The original five colony settlements on Arcadia are built in a north-to-south line starting with New Eden in the north of the continent, then Tranquility, Arcadia City, Midland, and Landing in the south, all spaced roughly two hundred kilometers apart between settlements. We made Arcadia City uninhabitable when we blew up its fusion plant with a dirty nuke, so its population of ten thousand had to be dispersed across the other four settlements in the short term. Now that we’ve started a proper settlement program down here in earnest, several more colony towns have sprung up in a second north-south line to the east of the original settlements, all started by the new NAC leadership and staffed and populated with handpicked, experienced people and their dependents on a volunteer basis. You’d figure that nobody would volunteer to settle a new colony 150 light-years from Earth while the Lankies are still out there snatching colonies and making more seed ships, but I hear that when the Arcadia settlement project was announced, the list of applicants was close to a million names long.

  When the tail ramp of the drop ship opens, a host of unbidden memories shoulder their way to the foreground in my brain. The temperature on this moon is always in the perfect range, low- to midtwenties Celsius. The skies are almost cloudless today, and I squint as Halley and I are walking down the ramp and onto the concrete drop ship pad at Fleet Air/Space Station Midland. I’m glad to see that we didn’t go to Tranquility to the north of Arcadia City. That’s the place my platoon wrecked with rifle fire, MARS rockets, and demolition charges during our distraction operation three years ago, when Masoud and his SEALs used us as a diversion so they could plant nukes on the terraformers on this moon. We killed half the garrison at Tranquility in the process, and even though I know we were in the right and they fired first, I’ll always regret having been instrumental in the deaths of so many people from what should have been our own side. I don’t want to spend liberty in a town where I may run into the families of those troopers.

  “The blue in the sky is different here,” Halley says. “Huh. I never noticed that the first time we were here.”

  “That’s because we didn’t have time to sightsee,” I say. “And we moved at night most of the time anyway.”

  I look up at the sky and concede that she is right. The atmosphere here on Arcadia feels Earthlike, but it refracts light differently. The blue is darker, which makes the white clouds stand out more. It looks like the view from a helmet visor with UV filters and contrast turned up a few notches. Completing the reminder that this isn’t Earth is the planet hanging on the horizon and taking up a good slice of our field of view—the ever-present Leonidas c, the blue gas giant to which Arcadia is tidally locked.

  The Fleet base looks like a mirror image of the one at Tranquility. It has the same runway and hangar layout, and the control center building obviously came from the same prefab assembly line as the one we shot up three years ago. I do a rough count and see about two squadrons’ worth of Shrikes lined up in the open hangars. Up on the control tower, a big NAC flag stirs in the light breeze.

  “We have twenty-four hours of fresh-air time,” Halley says. “What do you want to do down here until tomorrow morning?”

  “Find a place that serves on Fleet credit, get tanked, and then look for a quiet and cozy spot out in the green to, you know, talk. Or whatever it is we feel like doing.”

  “That sounds like a brilliant idea, Captain Grayson,” she replies with a satisfied nod. “I think I’ll let you stay in charge of event planning for this one.”

  The military compound around the airfield is much bigger than Tranquility’s base was three years ago. There are four multistory barracks buildings, vehicle sheds, a mess hall, and even a small RecFac. But I’m not too interested in spending my twenty-four hours on this moon rubbing elbows with other officers in yet another RecFac, so Halley and I decide to take a stroll into Midland, which is just a kilometer away from the base. They terraformed this place to perfection in the twenty years since they started this colony in secret. The air is the cleanest I’ve ever breathed on any colony except maybe New Svalbard, and the soil is dark and smells heavily earthy. With just a little bit of water, I could probably grow something just in the dirt stuck to the bottom of my boots. The only thing that looks a little out of place in thi
s bucolic scenery is the road going from the base to Midland. It’s made of asphalt and wide enough for two-way traffic, and it occurs to me that I’ve never seen an asphalt street on a colony planet.

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Halley says when I share this thought. “The most I’ve seen is that quick-lay concrete weave they can run off the back of an automatic paving unit. Wonder if they have the facilities to make asphalt locally.”

  “I doubt they spent the money to ship pavement to this place from a hundred and fifty light-years away. On the other hand, they brought a few ten thousand seed packs and saplings out here years ago already, so who knows.”

  “Watch us turn the corner into town, and it’s Liberty Falls, complete with waterfall,” she says.

  “Fucking government dependents. We have to weigh our possessions before each deployment, and they get to bring a portable suburb with them.”

  Whatever else they can do on their own out here, agriculture is very much among their capabilities. There are farm plots on either side of the road, lush green produce growing in fields of that rich-looking soil. Automated watering units make their rounds between the rows. Water is such a scarce resource on most colonies that the sight of it spraying freely from twenty-meter dispenser booms is more alien out here than a Lanky seed ship. On the far end of the field toward the town, there are half a dozen big greenhouses with solar panel arrays on the rooftops.

  “This is what I thought it would be like before I joined,” I say.

  “The colonies? Yeah, me too. Not those barren, dusty shitholes we keep fighting over most of the time.”

  “Barren, dusty shitholes, or frozen balls of ice. Nothing like this. I can see how they wanted to keep it for the chosen few.”

  From the direction of the base behind us, a pair of mules comes down the road at low speed. The mules have their gun mounts trained to the rear, and there are eight or ten Fleet personnel sitting on the rear deck of each vehicle, using the long barrel of the twenty-five-millimeter autocannon as a handhold. It’s a minor violation of safety regs usually only tolerated in combat, but I suspect that the garrison doesn’t want to deal with lots of disgruntled troops who were looking forward to a day out on the town and don’t want to wait for the garrison mules to make the twentieth round-trip. The troops on the rear deck of the mule are all talking and laughing, obviously having a good time on their improvised hydrobus. The mules pass us and continue down the road, whisper-quiet except for the hum of their knobby honeycomb tires on the asphalt.