by Marko Kloos
When we’re halfway between the Ellipse and the airfield, there’s a loud booming sound overhead, and the floor of the tunnel shakes. Some of the civvies shout out in concern. There’s another boom, this one stronger than the first, and ice particles fall from the ceiling and drift to the floor of the tunnel. The line of civilians starts moving faster, and so do we. If I am going to turn in my tags today, I don’t want it to be because I got buried alive under twenty meters of ice. I tell myself that once I am out of this tunnel, I’ll never step into another one for the rest of my life.
The end of the tunnel has been upgraded since I went through here last. Instead of a ladder, there’s a metal staircase leading up to the exit doors. At the top of the stairs, two SI troopers in battle armor are standing guard at the doors. The doors let out into the sublevel of the control center underneath the tower, and we spill out into the vestibule beyond the doors. As soon as we pass through the doors, we hear the rumbling of regular gunfire above, no longer filtered and insulated by thousands of tons of ice. With nothing to block the wireless signal, my TacLink screen updates again, and a jolt of fear goes through me when I see how small the perimeter has become. The Lankies have free run of the town from the Bravo Alpha grid line to the admin center on the eastern end, and the frontline is just a hundred meters from the edge of the airfield.
“Go and reinforce the line,” I shout at the lieutenants with me. “Keep them away from the landing pad if you want to go back to the ship today.”
Upstairs in the control tower, Major Coburn somehow looks even more drawn and haggard than he did just an hour or two ago.
“We have two thousand civvies in the tunnel,” I report. “The admin center is clear.”
“The fuckers already tore down the main antenna array over there,” Major Coburn says. “They’ll have a grand time trying to get into that ugly-ass bunker.”
Overhead, a flight of unseen Shrikes thunders by at low altitude. A few moments later, the Shrikes fire their guns into the town and release their ordnance pods blindly. Everything to the east of the Bravo Alpha grid line is now a free-fire zone, even if the attack birds can’t see any individual targets.
“They’re like fucking locusts,” Major Coburn says.
“I’ve never seen them go for close combat like this. It’s like they know that we can’t use our airpower if they’re right up in our faces.”
“Maybe they can sense the storm, and they know they’ll have to get under cover before it hits,” the major suggests.
I have an unnervingly good vantage point up here in the control tower. There’s a defensive line of troops strung across the runway to the south of the hangars and fuel tanks, and another on the outer edge of the airfield facing toward the east. I get glimpses of Lankies in the driving snow, advancing toward our lines and being met with withering defensive fire. Our beachhead has shrunk to a small patch of ground maybe three hundred meters across, and there are orange icons in every direction now. Mars was bigger in scope, but this feels worse somehow, more concentrated and vicious. Someone has set up two autocannon crews on the roof of the tower, and they’re sending out bursts of tracer rounds every time they spot a Lanky in the near-whiteout conditions to our east.
A flight of drop ships comes soaring out of the low cloud ceiling directly above the airfield. From their even intervals and precise maneuvers, I can tell they’re flying hands-off, with their computers locked on to the AILS beam of the landing pad. I check the markings on their tails and feel my heart doing a little jump when I see that the Dragonflies setting down right now belong to ATS-5, Halley’s squadron. One by one, the drop ships set down on the pad and lower their tail ramps. But instead of unloading more troops, each ship disgorges four troopers in exos. The heavy exoskeleton suits stomp down the steel ramps and onto the ice-covered concrete, where they kick up little puffs of white with every step.
“Someone going to let me in on what the deal is with those new toys?” Major Coburn asks.
“Experimental gear,” I say. “Power amplification combat system. We brought some with us on Ottawa. They kicked royal ass on the northern flank half an hour ago. A few dozen more of those, and we could clear the moon.”
On the landing pad below, the exos group up, then pair off. Each pair walks toward the perimeter in a different direction. The ones heading to the east and west edges of the airfield soon disappear from sight behind hangars and maintenance sheds. I watch the pair of exos stomping off to the north perimeter, faster with their casual-looking bouncy walk than a lightly loaded trooper can sprint.
“Drop ships are ready for pax,” the leader of the flight sends on the command channel. It’s not Halley’s voice, so I know she isn’t behind the stick of any of those ships.
The SI troopers downstairs start running people from the building to the waiting drop ships. The crew chiefs are standing at the bottoms of the ramps and counting people into their birds by hand. Even with all that gunfire and the shrieks from the Lankies nearby, the ice miners keep remarkable discipline. Everyone moves quickly, but nobody rushes the drop ships. The pilots don’t wait for the whole flight to be loaded up. As soon as the first Dragonfly on the far end is full, the ramp goes up, and the pilot pulls the ship up into the lead-colored sky at full throttle. The second one follows, then the third and fourth.
“Next flight ETA one minute, twenty-five seconds,” TacOps sends.
“Copy that. Keep sending them down as quickly as you can get them out of the clamps. We have over two thousand pax waiting down here, and the neighborhood is getting unfriendly. And, Garcia?”
“Go ahead, sir,” Garcia replies from the TacOps station hundreds of kilometers overhead.
“Next time I tell you to let me take your spot on a drop, punch me in the crotch,” I say.
Sergeant Garcia laughs.
“To be fair, sir, you asked to get put on a drop ship to Shitsville if you ever got too comfortable behind this console.”
“A fair point,” I concede.
CHAPTER 22
REQUIEM FOR A COLONY
I’ve never admired the piloting skills of our drop ship crews more than now.
For the next two hours, the two assault transport squadrons do the most coordinated high-risk aerial ballet I have ever seen. They come in like clockwork, a flight of four every few minutes, setting down and taking on passengers and taking off again to climb up to Ottawa and make space for the next flight to land. At least twice, I think I spot Halley’s ship. Most of the Dragonflies unload their cannons into the Lankies before they do their final approach, and the withering fire from so many barrels seems to have an effect. Slowly and laboriously, our SI troopers are pushing the Lankies back from the eastern edge of the airfield and back into the town, until we have a no-man’s-land of sorts stretching two hundred meters into the settlement. I know we’re taking casualties because there isn’t a single flight leaving without SI medics loading at least a few wounded troopers onto the departing birds. I share combat controller duties in the tower with Sergeant First Class Kaneda, and there are so many drop ships and attack birds in the sky overhead that we’re both at the limit of our mental bandwidth.
“All civilians are loaded up and away,” the departing flight from ATS-11 finally sends almost two hours later. The winds have picked up again, and the angry red line on the weather radar has advanced to within fifty kilometers of the town. I can’t see the clouds in the distance because of the whiteout conditions, but the sky has noticeably darkened over the last hour.
“All units, the civilians are away with no casualties,” Major Coburn sends on the local defense channel. “Start a clean fallback and contract the perimeter. We will have overhead cover fire until the last ship leaves the ground.”
The SI platoons pull back toward the airfield slowly. A fighting withdrawal to a waiting drop ship lift is called “letting the air out of the balloon,” and the troops on the airfield show the quality of their training by keeping control of the perimeter even u
nder the insane stress of facing twenty-meter enemies that can flatten a whole squad with one blow if they manage to close the distance. The PACS crews are the cornerstones of the shrinking defensive line. They move up and down the line, filling gaps in the fire coverage and stopping threatening breakthroughs with accurate and effective cover fire from their cannon pods. The old salts in the Fleet and SI usually make fun of the idea of combat exos, but I’ve decided that my skepticism was misplaced. They have many of the advantages of fighting vehicles with none of the weight or bulk penalty, and as I watch them tear up the Lankies on TacLink, I wish we had about a thousand of them in the inventory. And all through the battle, the drop ships keep coming down through the increasingly shitty weather, unloading their cannons to strafe the area beyond our defensive line and putting down to pick up troops. Every time a drop ship departs, 45 more troopers are on the way back to Ottawa, 180 grunts ferried to safety with every four-ship flight.
“Time to pack it up, Captain,” Major Coburn says to me when the outer line of defense is a mere fifty meters to the east of the control center, and the reports from the exos’ autocannons shake the window panels in the tower. We have three hundred troops and sixteen exos left on the ground, few enough to fit into two flights of Dragonflies. A four-ship formation thunders up the runway and over the formation of SI troopers and exos holding the line on the south end of the hangars. The ships pop up over the last hangar and set down on the pad in manual mode, barely wobbling despite the wind that has picked up to eighty-plus knots again.
Sergeant Kaneda and I make our way downstairs and onto the landing pad. I watch a squad from the eastern perimeter rush over to the pad and start boarding the ship, leaving a last squad and two exos to watch their backs. A Lanky comes stomping out of the blinding whiteout ahead to follow them, then falters when the two exos open fire with single shots each, and the SI troopers add a MARS rocket for good measure. The Lanky is only a hundred meters away when it falls and flattens one of the residential domes. Half a dozen dead Lankies are already laid out in front of this squad, and I’m sure there are more further out in the snow where I can’t see them. Technically, we kicked their asses. And yet they’ve once again scored the overall victory, because we are leaving this place and they are not.
Over on the flight pad, one of the drop ships has finished loading, and the Dragonfly lifts off the ground and retracts its skids. I can see that the winds are buffeting the ship, but the pilot corrects coolly, with a smoothness that tells me the ship isn’t on automatic takeoff. The departing Dragonfly raps out another burst from its cannons toward the Lanky-held area and then roars into the cloud cover.
I run up to the nearest drop ship, which has just lowered its tail ramp. I see the markings for ATS-5 on the tail assembly and look over at the cockpit, where the pilots wear their names and call signs stenciled right under the frames. This one says “MAJ HALLEY ‘COMET,’” and I bark a relieved laugh into my helmet.
Halley is anonymous behind her helmet visor, and I suppose my armor does the same for my appearance. Another squad is waiting to board, and I enter the ship with them and make my way to the forward bulkhead seat designated for unit leaders and combat control specialists. More troops come running up the ramp and dropping into seats, stowing their rifles and buckling up in a hurry. There’s absolutely nothing that lights a fire under a grunt’s ass like having to board one of the last battle taxis out of a hot LZ.
The exos are the last to retreat to the landing pad. The three drop ships that have already taken off are hovering overhead and emptying their magazines to cover the exoskeleton pilots as they unlock their harnesses, drop out of their machines, and come sprinting over to Halley’s drop ship. I realize that even if we had the space, there’d be no way to load up the exos under these circumstances without endangering the drop ships tasked to pick them up. The exoskeleton crews run up the tail ramp and find empty seats. The last one to board the ship is Major Coburn, who has been waiting at the foot of the ramp to make sure he’s the last SI trooper off the moon he was tasked to defend for so long, the moon for which his men bled and died before we arrived. Behind him, the exos stand in a ragged line on the airfield, millions of Commonwealth dollars’ worth of gear destined to be expensive scraps very soon. I know they’re just machines, but it feels like we’re abandoning a bunch of faithful guard dogs. They were the most effective equipment we brought into the ground battle, experimental kits that performed even better than expected, and we’re leaving them behind.
What a waste, I echo the words of the colony administrator in my head. What a goddamn waste.
“Loading complete,” the crew chief shouts into his helmet mike as he pushes the button for the tail ramp mechanism. “Go, go, go!”
Halley pulls the ship up and turns it around to swing it into the wind. I see the glass windows of the tower flash by through the narrowing gap in the tail hatch and the pile of discarded autocannon munitions containers on the roof. Then we are high enough that we’re out of reach of even the most audacious and long-armed Lanky, and the relief I feel makes my knees shake.
I do my usual check-in with the pilot, eager to hear Halley’s voice.
“Tailpipe One, in the back, requesting permission for operational control of the sensor suite,” I send to the cockpit. “And you’re a damn show-off for wanting to be the last bird off the ground.”
Halley’s inflections are different when she’s in her pilot mode, and she talks in the same slightly exaggerated drawl all pilots use for some reason, as if it’s a mandatory class at Drop Ship U.
“Says the knucklehead who just absolutely had to wait until the last bird,” she replies, and I smile when I hear the relief in her voice.
I’m always tired after a mission. There’s a special fatigue you feel after the adrenaline from battle wears off. Your body is tired and shaky, and your brain feels like it has just been wrung out and hung up to dry. But this time, I’m even more drained than usual. When we get bounced around in the atmosphere on the way up into orbit, I barely notice and hardly care. I don’t even feel hunger or thirst, even though I haven’t eaten since before we left Ottawa. All I want right now is a bunk and about three days of uninterrupted sleep, and I’m not even sure if that will be enough.
Maybe I am getting too old for this shit, I think. And now I fully understand why all the senior podheads like Colonel Masoud always look a lot older than they are.
Despite my request, I don’t bother accessing the sensors of the ship for my customary pre- and postbattle sightseeing. New Svalbard is covered in clouds anyway, but even if the skies were clear, all that’s down there now is a former colony that’s broken and violated, crawling with beings that use our bodies for building material. I’ve always liked the place despite its harsh environment, and I’ve even toyed with the idea of picking it as my destination after I retire from the service and get that free relocation ride to a colony. But that’s all irrelevant now, because Fomalhaut will have no human presence anymore after we transition out of the system. Instead of looking back at what is once again a graveyard, I rest my helmet against the soft spall liner on the bulkhead and fall asleep, and I only wake up again when the automatic docking clamps deposit Halley’s Dragonfly on the flight deck of Ottawa thirty minutes later.
Halley is still in her cockpit shutting down avionics when I walk off the tail ramp of her ship. Impossible as it seems, the gigantic flight deck of Ottawa feels overcrowded for the first time. Two thousand civilians are milling around or sitting on the deck, many of them looking as shell-shocked as I feel.
“Request permission to take a week off, Captain,” Sergeant Kaneda says next to me, and I grin weakly.
“Go check in with the OOD and make a beeline to your stateroom, Sergeant. And if you see anyone else from the CCT, tell them the same. Don’t come out again until you’ve had a shower and at least eight hours of uninterrupted sleep. That’s an order.”
“Aye, sir,” Sergeant Kaneda says. “With all due
respect, you should do the same. You look like you’ve been run over with a mule, sir.”
“That’s the very next thing on my agenda, Sarge. Now go hit the rack.”
I walk around the Dragonfly’s portside wing and to the front of the ship. Halley looks up from her screens when she notices me. The Dragonfly is a low-slung ship, and when it’s standing on its skids on the flight deck, the pilot’s head is only very slightly above a standing person’s head level. I walk up to the armored window panel, take my helmet off, and rest my forehead against the window. Halley pulls her own helmet off and does the same on the other side, and we remain like this for a little while, until the maintenance crew comes around the front of Halley’s bird and starts hooking up service umbilicals.
Despite my fatigue, I only manage to sleep for two hours before the watch-change announcement wakes me up again. I allow myself the luxury of yet another shower, even though I already took one before I hit the rack. Then I change into the uniform of the day, the blueberry suit, which feels decadently soft after half a day in battle armor. I decide that the new uniform is not so bad after all, even if it does look a bit like a space leisure suit.
I relieve Sergeant Garcia in CIC, who most likely had the busiest watch of his entire deployment, even if it wasn’t half as exciting as mine or Sergeant Kaneda’s. The entire CCT was assigned to SI companies, and Sergeants Taggart, Wilcox, Winters, and Graff spent three hours in ready-to-go drop ships until First Battalion’s drop was canceled. The other combat controllers, Sergeants Kaneda, Hernandez, and Lang, were on the surface and are now under standing orders to spend the next watch cycle in their bunks. We took a lot of casualties on New Svalbard, but I am beyond glad that I didn’t lose any of my team. Other commanding officers will have to attend funerals and write letters to the families of young men and women just like I had to do after Arcadia, but I won’t have to add that to my list of worries today at least.