by Marko Kloos
“Copy that. Eighteen hundred at three one seventy-five.”
The replenishing process usually takes a few hours, but we stay attached to Hampton Beach for close to six hours, an unusually long amount of time for a ship whose skipper is in a hurry to get somewhere. I’m in the middle of a four-hour watch in CIC when we finally detach the replenishment collar and maneuver away from Hampton Beach to light up our main engines.
“Now hear this: underway replenishment operation complete. We are commencing our transit to the Alcubierre point. Closest approach to Earth will be in two hours, thirty-eight minutes,” the XO announces on the 1MC.
“That’s our last stop in the system unless something essential falls off this ship,” he says to Colonel Yamin. “Reactor fuel is at one hundred percent. We’ve cleaned Hampton Beach out of all their medical supplies and rations. Ammo magazines and stores are full, but we took on a few tons of small-arms ammunition and two hundred AGM-551s for the Shrikes.”
“Let’s hope we won’t have to go through all that ammo when we get to the far end,” Colonel Yamin says. “Helm, resume plotted course to the node. Get us up to full burn.”
“Aye, ma’am. Resuming course, all ahead full.”
My perception of the ship’s gravity does not change, but the numbers next to Ottawa’s icon on the main plot do. The ship starts accelerating again at over twenty meters per second squared, and the velocity reading next to the icon starts clicking up decimal points rapidly. I check the bigger plot at system-level zoom and see that our turnaround point for the reverse burn is two-thirds of the way between Earth and the asteroid belt. We’ll be at turnaround in two days, and at the Alcubierre node in four, much faster than I’ve ever made an Earth transit to the node without using liberal gravitational help from either Earth or Mars.
“Report from the OOD on the numbers for offloaded personnel, ma’am,” the XO says.
“How many did we transfer?” Colonel Yamin asks.
The XO brings up the report screen on his PDP and shows it to Colonel Yamin, who looks at it and then nods with a satisfied smile.
“Good for them.” She picks up her handset and motions for the comms officer to open a 1MC line. “All hands, this is the CO. We have offloaded seventeen civilian contractors to Hampton Beach. None of the one hundred and twenty-five Eurocorps members on this ship have taken the offer to transfer back to Earth.”
She pauses and looks around in CIC, where everyone present either smiles or nods approvingly.
“As your commanding officer, I won’t tell you to intentionally violate regulations,” she continues. “But if you want to buy a Eurocorps ally a drink with your alcohol allocation tonight at the RecFac, you will find that nobody’s going to look closely. That is all. CO out.”
It’s an unexpected morale boost to learn that our Eurocorps allies have decided to a man and woman that they’re in it for the duration, even if that means going into harm’s way along with the rest of us. I would have been tempted to take the ride off the ship, but I know that Halley and I would have decided the same way if the assignments were reversed.
I send to Halley:
>Between that and Mars, I’ll have to stop making fun of the Euros.
A little while later, she sends back:
>Let’s not go too far with the international brotherhood thing. But they can have my beer chit tonight.
After chow, I head down to Grunt Country, the section of the ship where the Spaceborne Infantry detachment is berthed. A regiment of SI has two battalions, with four companies per battalion and four platoons per company, almost twelve hundred grunts in total. All of them are trigger pullers, because the Fleet is handling their logistics, equipment maintenance, and administrative tasks. The SI berthing and office spaces for the embarked infantry are usually among the most crowded on a warship, but Ottawa continues its streak of breaking conventions. The compartments down here are spacious and the passageways wide enough for three troopers to walk abreast.
Hansen is in her company commander office, talking to a gunnery sergeant who’s standing in front of her desk at parade rest. She sees me peeking into the compartment and gives me a little wave.
“That should get things sorted, Gunny. You have your waypoints. Dismissed.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the gunnery sergeant says. He turns and leaves the compartment. On the way past me, he gives me a respectful nod.
“Good evening, Captain.”
“Evening, Gunny.”
I walk into Hansen’s office compartment. The bulkheads are barren of decorations. On Earth, where troops don’t have to worry about the weight of their personal possessions, a lot of company-grade and staff officers usually have an ego wall in their office, plaques and awards and pictures of previous units. SI and Fleet officers on deployment don’t get the luxury of an ego wall, and the practice is so typical for shorebound pencil pushers that most of us wouldn’t adopt the practice even if we were allowed three tons of possessions on deployment.
“That’s the worst part about officer rank,” Hansen says. “All this admin bullshit. Don’t you just want to put a round into your terminal screen sometimes?”
“Once or twice a week,” I say.
“Then you have more patience than I do.” Hansen gets up from her chair and shuts her screen down with a tap.
“Ready to go and get some drinks?” she asks.
“Am I ever. Lead the way, Captain.”
The RecFac closest to Grunt Country is a unified compartment, with separate sections for officers and enlisted. From the sounds coming from the enlisted side, the place is pretty full on the other side of the partition, but the officer side is agreeably empty. We walk to the bar and collect our drinks—soy beer for her and alcohol-free malt beer for me, part of my penance for the unauthorized gun. There are four or five junior SI officers sitting in booths and nursing their allowed beverage for the day, and Hansen and I have no trouble finding a quiet booth at the end of the room in front of the big bulkhead screen that shows the space outside. It’s not as impressive as the domed ceiling in the Fleet’s officer facility, but it beats looking at bulkhead paint.
“Did you get rid of the ponytail when you switched to SI?” I ask. The ponytail was her trademark feature back then, an unusual style that tip-toed right on top of the line of a uniform rule violation.
“Oh no. I cut it off long before then.” She runs a hand through her short blonde hair. “I let it grow even longer after you left the 365th. At one point, I even braided it.”
“So why’d you chop it?”
“CQB is why,” Hansen says. “Got into a tussle one day out in a PRC. Three guys jumped me while I was in the middle of a mag change. One of them grabbed that braid and used it as a handle. Tried to make my head an integral part of the pavement.”
“Didn’t go well for him, I’d imagine.”
“No, it did not. You know the knives they issued back in the TA? Those big, heavy piece-of-shit telescoping blades that nobody ever bothered packing for drops? Well, after Detroit, we all carried them again. Mine was still factory sharp. Took the guy’s hand off right at the wrist. And after we got back to base, I cleaned it and used it to cut that dumb-ass braid off.”
“God, we were so full of it,” I say.
“Ain’t that the fucking truth.” Hansen takes a long swig from her bottle. “I want to go back in time and shake the shit out of the little moron I was back then.”
“She wasn’t you yet,” I say. “We’re not those kids anymore.”
“I guess not. To be honest, the time at Shughart is just kind of a blur these days. I try not to think about it too much. Everything, and I mean everything went to shit not a year after you left. Jackson and the sarge gone. The rest of us getting split up and sent to new units. When they looked for volunteers to switch to SI, I signed so fast that my pen left a contrail.”
“Sergeant Fallon told me about the unit getting broken up.”
“Yeah, about that. How in the fuck d
id you get her to serve as your platoon sergeant?”
“I asked nicely. And she felt like she owed me one, I guess. But after Arcadia, I don’t think you could get her back into space if you told her at gunpoint.”
“I want to know what went down there,” Hansen says, and there’s a trace of excitement in her voice. “On the Arcadia mission.”
“You’ve probably heard all about it on Fleet News Network. Or the enlisted rumor mill.”
“Yeah, but they only give the official version on the Network. And the rumor mill just distorts shit. You were on the ground. I don’t know anyone else who was.”
“I had a platoon of SI under me. We got to the system, did recon, and landed a company on that moon with four of those new stealth drop ships. My platoon and I played hide-and-seek with the local garrison for a few days. The commanding officer saw fit to use us as a diversion so his SEAL team could plant nuclear demolition charges on most of the fusion reactors. And it worked.”
I tell her the broad details of the mission, filling her in on everything but the unpleasant details I don’t feel like talking about—the relay station, the escaping shuttle I ordered destroyed, the men and women we lost in that last-ditch assault on their main command-and-control facility. She lets out a low whistle when I get to the part where the nuke goes off and Masoud broadcasts his ultimatum to the garrison forces.
“That is some hardcore planning and execution,” Hansen says. “One company and four drop ships, and you got a reinforced battalion and a carrier task force to surrender. I always wondered about the details.”
“They had no choice. Masoud would have blown up every single fusion reactor on that moon. Nobody is willing to chance a bet when the stakes are that high. And he wasn’t bluffing.”
“Like I said, hardcore. Man, I never got to do anything half as ballsy. I would have volunteered for that mission in a heartbeat.”
“You probably would have done better than I did,” I say. “I’m not an infantry platoon leader. I’m an air-traffic controller with a gun and a radio. But they were short on podheads at the time.”
“It sounds like you did just fine,” Hansen says.
“I don’t know about that. But I’m still here. Some of the troops that came along aren’t.”
“But you got back, and you got the job done. That’s war, Grayson. People die all the time. You’re in charge of anything other than your own pair of boots, you’re bound to lose people. Comes with the rank. For us grunts, anyway. Some of those console jockeys in CIC can probably make it all the way to staff officer without putting anyone’s ass on the line.”
Hansen takes another swig from her bottle.
“Ah, fuck it. We’re all between a rock and a hard place. I figure ten more years, and then I’ve earned that lifer bonus.”
“What are you going to do when you get out of the corps?” I ask.
“I don’t know yet. Maybe get a place in the ’burbs somewhere. Get fat on civvie chow. See if I can find someone I can live with. It’s gotta be a veteran, though, because I’ve got precisely fuck-all in common with civilians. Last time I was home for leave, my mother wanted to fix me up with this guy.” Hansen smiles and shakes her head at the memory.
“He was nice enough. Good-looking, too. But man, it’s like we were talking different languages at dinner. We had no common point of reference. He had a nice body, though, so at least the evening wasn’t a total wash.”
“They have different priorities. They can’t relate to the shit that we do up here. Of course, I can’t relate to theirs, either. I mean, when you’ve seen what we’ve seen, can you still pretend like any of that civilian bullshit is a big deal?”
“I’d tell you not to date outside your own species, but it doesn’t look like you have to worry about that,” Hansen says.
“Yeah, I lucked out. Ten years and counting.”
“What about you?” she asks. “What are you going to do? Try to make it to twenty years for the big payday?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe. Podheads are usually burned out by forty. Too much stress. Physical and mental. If I stay in much longer, I’m gonna have to go lifer just for the medical care after retirement.”
“They really have us by the balls, Grayson. The more they spend on training you, the more use they want to get out of you. At least we have stars now.” She puts her bottle on the table between us and turns it slowly with one hand. “Easier to resign a commission than to get out as enlisted. You don’t have to wait for that contract to end.”
“And you forfeit bonuses and medical care,” I say.
“Yeah, that too. But at least it’s a quick way out. They can’t quite make the noose so tight that nobody can slip out of it.”
“It all depends on what my wife wants to do. If I want out and she wants to stay in, or vice versa, we have a bit of an issue.”
“Well, there’s one advantage to being single,” Hansen says. “I don’t know how you do it, with all the hoops we have to jump through for the corps. And she’s on the same ship?”
I nod.
“I wouldn’t want that. If this thing gets shot to ribbons by the Lankies, you’ll both snuff it.”
“Honestly?” I say. “We would both prefer it that way. Going out at the same time, I mean.”
Hansen looks at me as if she can’t decide if I am joking. Then she shakes her head and takes another sip from her bottle.
“See? Marriage is weird. I think I’ll stick with space husbands. Three months at a time is about as much commitment as I can handle.”
“Marriage is great. It’s the one thing I have to come back to every time, no matter how shitty things get out here,” I reply.
“I don’t think I am cut out for it,” Hansen says. “Good for you if you are, though.” Her gaze locks with mine for just a moment too long, and I quickly take a swig of my drink.
“I’m fraying at the edges, I think,” I say to change the subject. “Mentally, I mean. Do you ever get stressed out enough to want to take someone’s head off?”
“Every other day,” Hansen says with a smirk.
“You ever see the shrink about it?”
“Hell no. That shit isn’t for me.” Hansen takes a sip from her bottle and puts it down on the table with emphasis. “I know what bugs me. I don’t need assistance from some rear-echelon psych quack. All they do is pump you full of meds.”
I don’t want to tell Hansen that I let them put me on meds because I know that she’d see it as a sign of weakness. Too many grunts are caught up in the mind-set that a frontline soldier should be able to manage that sort of thing on their own, that seeking help from a professional is somehow unbecoming. I know that she’s wrong to dismiss it out of hand because the stuff I am taking really helps—it evens out the highs and lows for me—but I don’t want to have that discussion with Hansen right now because I know she wouldn’t appreciate it.
“Hey, that’s what they made booze for, right?” she continues and raises her bottle to eye level.
“That’s the truth,” I feign agreement, and touch my bottle to hers.
We talk for a while longer, mostly reminiscing about the time we were at Fort Shughart together, but I find that the old memories have started to fade. Revisiting them with Hansen is not making them any more defined. We only shared a few months of service time as squad mates, and it all ended in a clusterfuck of epic proportions when Stratton and Paterson got killed and I had to transfer to the navy. Hansen already had a year of service and veteran status when I joined the battalion as a raw recruit, so even the experience we shared at Shughart wasn’t the same for both of us. And since then, she has gone her own way and built up her own catalog of victories, regrets, and nightmare material. Still, talking to her feels good because it makes me feel like Halley and I are not statistical aberrations, that there are others out there who have made it through ten years of war against the SRA and then the Lankies. That way, I don’t feel like we’re just unusually lucky and due to
get our tickets punched any day now.
“Now hear this,” the announcement comes over the 1MC just before 1900 hours. “We are now in the closest-distance window for high-bandwidth network traffic to Earth. Ottawa’s neural network will be low-latency for the next three hours and forty-five minutes.”
This is a cue for the crew of Ottawa to contact their loved ones on Earth via live link if they want to have a direct video talk without long delays. It’s hard to have a conversation when you need to wait fifty seconds for your transmission to get to the other party, and their reply another fifty seconds to get back to you. For the next three hours and change, many of the crew will avail themselves to what will be the last opportunity for face-to-face conversations before we go into battle.
“I should take advantage of this,” Hansen says. We’ve long finished our allotted beer for the evening, and she’s been toying with her bottle for the last twenty minutes. “Call the folks, give them an update. It’s been three months.”
“Yeah, me too,” I say, even though I don’t have anyone to call on Earth. Mom has a dependent account, but there’s no secure military terminal in her place, and she has to go to the nearest government facility to check for messages from me. There’s no way for me to get her on a live link unless she happens to be in front of a terminal when I call, and that’s almost impossible to orchestrate.
We get out of our chairs and dispose of the empty brown, plastic bottles in the recycler chute.
“It was good to see you, Grayson,” Hansen says. “Glad you’re still sucking down air.”
“Good to see you, too,” I reply. “Let’s do this again after we get back from Fomalhaut.”
“Count on it,” she says.
She gives me a brief hug, and we part ways. She’s heading back to Grunt Country, and I turn the other way in the passageway to go back up to the command deck. Her body language during our conversation, the way she leaned toward me and met my eyes with hers as much as possible, told me that she’d be more than receptive if I applied for the current space husband position in earnest, Halley or not. But our talk has reinforced to me just how well Halley and I match each other after ten years, and how comfortable we are with each other’s flaws and idiosyncrasies. Hansen’s subtle cues are flattering, but I don’t intend to use them as anything but a little ego boost.