by Marko Kloos
“The Lankies have broken through our defensive line. Thirty-plus individuals, moving south along the northern access road. We are falling back to the west to regroup.”
The bright orange icons on the TacLink map are piercing the blue defensive line in numbers. As they move south and out of sight of the troopers on the perimeter, their color fades to pale orange. With the rest of the defending forces concentrated to ward off the southern push, there’s nothing and nobody keeping the Lankies from walking right into the middle of New Svalbard.
“Alpha One and Charlie Four, fall back to the admin center at grid square Bravo Foxtrot One-Seven and defend the perimeter,” Major Coburn orders. “We have to pull back the northern line, or they’ll outflank you and crush your position from two sides. We have a company arriving from Ottawa. I’m sending them in to form a defensive line across the north-south axis at grid line Bravo Charlie.”
An hour ago, we were confident that our reinforcements would turn the tide and crush the Lankies. Four strike squadrons, two full battalions, orbital fire support. But the weather and the need for an overextended static defense line have cost us all our advantages, and with the Lanky breakthrough in the northern center, we just lost the initiative as well.
The admin building looks just like I remember it. It’s a tall, windowless concrete structure shaped like a bread loaf. All the buildings on New Svalbard are designed to withstand the ferocious winter weather here, but the admin building is overbuilt even for local conditions. I’ve been inside many times, and I know that the walls are several meters thick. The whole thing is so massive that it would take a bunker-busting nuke to take it out.
We redeploy and set up hasty defensive positions on both west-facing corners of the building. Without any close-air support to direct, I have very little to do, and the two lieutenants in charge of their platoons can run their own shows, so I step into the entrance vestibule of the admin center. The corners of the building still bear the pockmarks from Shrike cannon fire, inflicted by the attack craft of Midway five years ago when they tried to suppress our little mutiny. So much has happened since that day that it feels like those events were lived out by someone else.
When the inner doors open, the sudden gust of warmer air makes my helmet visor fog up instantly. I raise the visor and step into the atrium of the admin building. The atrium is packed with cargo crates and pallets, and several civilians are busy carrying more crates out of adjoining rooms. At the far end of the atrium, a very tall and familiar-looking man in a dark colonial police uniform and light body armor is talking to a small group of civvie techs. He turns around when the inner doors close and the safety bolts latch into place again with a loud metallic clanking sound. I nod at him, and he comes walking over, cradling a well-worn M-66C fléchette carbine that looks distinctly toylike in his arms.
“What’s the word, Trooper?” he says.
“Good to see you again, Constable Guest,” I say, and his eyes narrow a little in surprise.
“Do I know you?”
He looks at the name plate on my armor, but when I look down, I see that it’s caked with snow and ice. Instead of brushing it off, I just pop the latches on my helmet and pull it off my head.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” colonial constable Guest says. “Staff Sergeant Grayson. Never thought I’d see you around here again.”
Constable Guest extends his hand, and I shake it. Even though I’m wearing armored gloves and he isn’t, my hand disappears in his enormous paw. The constable is the tallest and most massive person I’ve ever seen at well over two meters tall. His chest circumference more than matches his height, and nothing about him is delicate in any way except for his carefully measured handshake.
“It’s Captain Grayson now,” I correct him. “They roped me into pinning on stars.”
“I am not surprised,” Constable Guest says with a smile. “Cream always rises to the top.”
“Yeah, so do other things,” I reply, and he grins. “I just got here with two platoons of infantry. They’re setting up defenses right outside. The Lankies have broken through our defensive perimeter and into the town.”
“I knew we weren’t going to be able to hold them off the moment the Fleet ship told us we had three seed ships on the way.” Constable Guest shakes his head and sighs. “Why now? They’ve left us alone for almost ten years. Never showed any interest in this moon. Not even after they took the SRA colony five years ago. I thought we’d be able to fly under their radar indefinitely.”
“How many civilians are left down here?”
“A little less than two thousand. We wound down operations over the years. What’s left is only essential personnel. Most everyone else evacuated back to Earth.”
“What about your family?”
“They go where I go,” he says. “We moved everyone into the tunnels before the Lankies made orbit. Wasn’t much of a logistical effort. Winter’s about to set in down here anyway.”
“Is the ops center still where it used to be?”
“Yes, it is. Let me go with you.” He turns and gestures for me to follow him.
I have the strangest feeling of déjà vu as we walk through familiar corridors to the secured ops center in the middle of the first floor. During the rebellion on New Svalbard, I spent entire days and nights in that room, staying in touch with Indianapolis in orbit and coordinating the defense of the town. Everything looks the way it did half a decade ago, but just like in the control tower on the airfield, there are more signs of wear and infrequent maintenance. I guess when you live on a moon that’s actively trying to kill you most of the time, keeping the wall paint freshened up is low on the list of priorities.
The ops room has more people in it than I remember seeing in here on my last stay. Everyone looks over to the door when Constable Guest and I walk in, and I nod at the room in general.
“Captain Grayson, this is the administrator, Director Maynard. Director, this is Captain Grayson with the Fleet. He helped us out five years ago during the troubles with the garrison.”
“Captain,” the administrator says. “What can we do for you?”
“I have a detachment of SI outside to defend the building. The Lankies have broken through and are now advancing into the town from the northern access road. I’m sorry to say that your greenhouses are gone. We tried to hold them back, but then we had to withdraw to avoid getting flanked.”
“The ground commander at the airfield gave me the rough sketch,” Director Maynard says. He’s lean and wiry and slightly scruffy like most of the settlers here, and he’s wearing a faded blue cap with the logo of the Colonial Administration. “Now that you’ve killed their ships, what are the chances of us pulling out of this and getting rid of our uninvited guests?”
“The way things are looking right now, not so good, sir.”
“I appreciate your candor, Captain. Bill, come over here and tell the Fleet officer what you told me before they walked in.”
Another civilian engineer detaches himself from his console and walks over to us.
“Bill Cunningham,” he introduces himself as we shake hands. “I’m the chief meteorologist in this facility.”
“Andrew Grayson. I’m the special tactics officer of the Fleet detachment. Please tell me we have a stretch of good weather coming. Our close-air support is all but grounded in this mess.”
“Well, I have good news and bad news for you, Captain.” Mr. Cunningham waves me over to his console, and I follow him. He sits down in his chair with a sigh and brings up his terminal screens. Then he flicks through a few screens and brings up a radar map.
“That’s the situation on this part of the continent,” he says. There’s a light pen next to a half-empty coffee mug on his desk, and he grabs it and turns it on. “We are here. That bunch of red coming in from the north is the first big winter storm of the season.”
“You mean that isn’t a winter storm outside right now? We can barely see a hundred meters.”
Mr. Cunningham shakes his head with a smile.
“No, that’s not a winter storm. Those are just flurries. That red band, that’s a winter storm. You’re looking at three-hundred-kilometers-per-hour windspeed.”
“Holy shit,” I say. “How long is that going to last?”
“Two weeks, maybe three.”
“Three weeks?”
“If it’s not an overly energetic system, yes. We’ve had longer ones.”
I run a hand through my hair, which is damp with perspiration. “What’s the good news, then?”
“There is a patch of good weather. Relatively speaking, of course. The winds should slack off to about fifty kilometers per hour within the next thirty minutes according to our weather station network. It won’t pick up again until a few hours before the main front of the winter storm gets here.”
“How long is that break in the weather?”
“About two and a half hours. It’s going to get progressively worse after that.”
“Oh, that’s just fucking fabulous.” I look at the angry-looking storm front that’s forming a red sickle shape to our north on the radar. There will be nothing taking off or landing from the airfield in winds of that strength, not even with a fully automated AILS landing system.
“Excuse me for just a moment. I need to talk to the garrison commander.”
I put my helmet back on and switch to the command channel.
“Frostbite Actual, this is Tailpipe One.”
“Tailpipe One, go ahead,” Major Coburn replies after a few seconds.
“Sir, I am at the admin center. We are in defensive posture. The meteorology crew here at the facility are mapping an incoming storm on radar.”
“Stand by for one.” The channel goes quiet for a minute as Major Coburn undoubtedly consults his own terminal for the latest feed from the weather radar.
“I see the storm front. Looks like we don’t have much time to clear the town and reestablish the perimeter.”
“Sir, that’s pointless,” I say. “We need to get out of here before that storm gets here, or we’re not going anywhere for a long time. There’s no way we’ll last three weeks defending this place in three-hundred-klick winds.”
Next to me, Mr. Cunningham shakes his head.
“No, sir. It’ll be total whiteout,” he says. “You’ll walk face-first into buildings because you won’t be able to see where you are going. That’s if the wind doesn’t blow you halfway across the continent.”
“We need to evac all the civilians and ground troops while we still can,” I say. “This colony is lost, sir.”
Next to me, Constable Guest and the two civilians are sucking in breaths as if I had just committed a particularly rude and offensive form of blasphemy.
“You propose to evacuate two thousand civilians and a thousand troops in under three hours, Captain?”
“Ottawa has two squadrons of drop ships, plus half a dozen spares,” I say. “We can do that in two flights. Forty-five minutes per flight, fifteen minutes for each flight to load.”
“I will not give up this colony,” Director Maynard says firmly. “We can wait them out underground. See how they like three-hundred-klick winds and negative one hundred degrees.”
“They’ll burrow in the ice and make your tunnels collapse,” I say. “I’ve seen them dig a five-hundred-meter tunnel and a cave into bare ice on Greenland in just a month. And that was just a dozen of these things. Sir, your colony is lost. We need to get your people out of here before we all get buried in those tunnels together.”
Constable Guest shrugs at the administrator. “Hate to say it, Sam, but the captain has a point. And with the greenhouses gone, our goose is cooked anyway. By the time the storm has passed, they’ll have smashed the fusion plant, too.”
“Goddammit.” Director Maynard takes off his blue cap and smacks it against the frame of the meteorology console. “Nine years of back-breaking fucking work, and it comes to this.”
“All right,” Major Coburn says on the command channel. “I’ll contact Ottawa Actual and let them know our intentions. I am ordering all military personnel on this moon to retreat to the airfield and establish a perimeter for evacuation. Transmit to all units.”
“Copy that,” I reply. Then I look at Director Maynard.
“Sir, the commander on the ground has ordered the evacuation. I strongly suggest you follow suit and get your people to the airfield. Once that storm comes in, we won’t be able to protect anyone or go anywhere. I’m sorry, but we’ve lost this one.”
Director Maynard nods, but I can see the muscles flexing on the sides of his jaw.
“I want to disagree, but I don’t have the right to make that gamble for two thousand people,” he says. Then he walks over to another console and picks up a headset. A moment later, his voice comes from the overhead speakers.
“All colonial personnel, this is the administrator. We are evacuating this facility. All personnel, make your way to the airfield via express tunnel Broadway in a calm and orderly fashion and obey all directions from military personnel. Only take your essentials. We will not have space for luggage or cargo, so don’t bring any. We’ve drilled for this, people. I’m sorry to say that this is not a drill. Good luck and Godspeed, everyone.”
He takes off the headset and drops it on the console in front of him. Then he rubs his beard stubble with one hand and looks around the control center.
“What a waste,” he says, and shakes his head. “What a goddamn waste.”
“Alpha One and Charlie Four, abandon your position and come inside,” I send to the platoon commanders in front of the admin center. Constable Guest and I are on the way back into the atrium at a fast walk, the constable outpacing me easily.
“Sublevel three for the tunnels?” I ask, and the constable nods.
“I never had a chance to go to that bar in the Ellipse one more time,” I say. “What was it called again?”
“On the Rocks,” Constable Guest replies. “Damn, I’m going to miss that place. My daughter had her first job there. Best drinks on this moon.”
“I got the worst hangover of my life here.”
“Lousy food, rough crowd, but man, do they know how to mix a cocktail.” Constable Guest changes course slightly and walks over to one of the offices attached to the atrium. It’s the little two-room police station he has been manning for the last ten years. I follow him inside and look around, unsurprised to see that it has changed very little from the way it looked in my memory.
Constable Guest walks to the comms unit on the wall and picks up the microphone.
“This is the boss. All officers, head down into Broadway and do traffic control, please. We don’t need any pushing matches. Tell them there’s no need to hurry. We have plenty of time to get on the ships. Phelps and Martin, make a sweep of the Ellipse and make sure nobody’s lagging behind because they want to make sure the alcohol doesn’t go to waste. Thank you all, ladies and gents, and I’ll see you on the ship.”
The officers send their acknowledgments back, and Constable Guest hangs up the handset.
“Well, that’s that, I suppose.” He looks around in the office. His diplomas and pictures are still hanging on the walls just like they did five years ago, and he makes no move to take them down.
“You’re not packing those?”
“Oh no,” he says. “I can always get new printouts. I’m not much of a materialist.”
Outside in the atrium, the inner door opens, and a bunch of SI troopers from First Platoon come in from the cold, their armor encrusted with ice.
“I’ll give you a minute,” I tell Constable Guest. “I’ll have to show the grunts how to get to the tunnels.”
“I’m good,” he replies. “Got all I needed. Not exactly how I pictured my last shift here to end, that’s all.”
“Sorry about that.”
“All good things must come to an end, and all that. At least it’s a rescue. Could be worse.”
“It could alw
ays be worse,” I agree, remembering the dead settlers on the streets of a colony named Willoughby and thinking of the bodies the Lankies dragged into their holes on Mars.
Down in the Ellipse, the civilians are streaming toward the tunnel intersection for Broadway, the long, straight express tunnel that goes from the main underground district of the town straight to the admin building on the airfield. At the intersection, two cops are standing guard to funnel the stream of people into a single line. The mood down here is somber, but not panicked. I don’t see anyone with children in the crowd. The personnel that remained on New Svalbard after the waves of exodus over the last few years are the toughest and most hard-bitten miners and technicians. When I was here before, it felt like a proper colony, with families and small kids. Now it looks like any other mining outpost in the solar system, hard people living hard lives.
“I’m going to stay here and make sure everyone gets out,” Constable Guest says as we leave the concourse and enter the express tunnel. I stop and turn around to face him.
“Just as long as you don’t have any heroic notions of going down with the ship,” I say.
“I’m not an idiot,” he grins. “My wife and daughters will be super pissed at me if I get killed over a few million cubic meters of ice. Bet your ass I’ll be on the last ship out.”
“I’ll hold you to it,” I say and shake the constable’s hand. “See you topside.”
In the Broadway tunnel, we pass the civilians at a trot. They give us curious glances as we run by, loaded down with battle armor and weapons. I remind myself to tell Hansen that I finally found a scenario for which all that running on the track proved to be good preparation. The Broadway tunnel is five meters wide and almost perfectly straight for the whole kilometer of its length.