by Marko Kloos
The plot still shows us in geostationary orbit above what used to be New Longyearbyen, now Population: None. The Michael P. Murphy is flying in close formation off to our starboard side. The destroyer has recently patched holes in the hull that are unmistakably Lanky penetrator impacts from her earlier engagement, but she’s still largely in one piece. For what we destroyed and killed in the exchange, we all got off light, which makes the loss of the colony doubly painful. Victories shouldn’t hurt like this.
“The flight deck is clear, ma’am,” the XO says to Colonel Yamin. “The civilians have been checked in and assigned bunk space. One thousand nine hundred thirty-three.”
“Where did the quartermaster find extra space for almost two thousand people?” Colonel Yamin asks.
“We’ve put them on the running track, ma’am. With field shelters and sleeping bags.”
“I see.” Colonel Yamin raises an eyebrow. “Whatever works, I guess. At least they’re not clogging up my flight deck.”
She turns her attention back to the holotable and sighs with emphasis.
“That leaves only one thing to do before we leave this shithole of a system.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the XO replies.
“Weps, open Hades silos five and six. Nuclear-fire mission authorized. Target is the city of New Longyearbyen. Set the warheads for ground penetration, maximum yield. Let’s glass the bastards and get out of here.”
“Aye, ma’am. Opening silos five and six. Target programmed and locked. Ready for launch on your mark.”
The big screen on the forward CIC bulkhead shows a big slice of the equatorial region of New Svalbard, so I have a ringside seat to Armageddon. The missiles from Ottawa streak moonward and enter the atmosphere, far faster than any drop ship or Shrike could. There’s heavy cloud cover over New Longyearbyen again, so I don’t see the moment of impact directly. But when it happens, it’s hard to miss. A sun-bright flash lights up the clouds from below, and a minute later, the mushroom cloud from the twenty-megaton thermonuclear explosion rises through the clouds, roiling black and red, ash and fire. And then everything down there is no more. Everything we risked our necks for five years ago, willing to throw away our careers and our freedom so the colonists could stay in charge of their own world, all scattered into the moon’s stratosphere and irradiated for the next hundred years or more.
The fate of New Svalbard was sealed the moment the three seed ships made orbit above the colony. There is no way we could have reclaimed it from the Lankies after a week of landings. They had already begun to dismantle our terraformers, and even if we had been able to scrape them off the moon, the colony would have died of cold and starvation without their fusion plants and food sources. But it’s still demoralizing to know that the weapon that killed the scrappy little colony for good came from our own launchers. It was a mercy killing, but a killing nonetheless. And as I look at the boiling, angry-looking cloud rising from the impact site as if it’s trying to reach us in orbit, I remember something I said to Halley in the aftermath of another battle, this one almost nine years ago on a far-off colony world named Willoughby.
If this is a victory, I’d hate to see what it looks like when we get our asses kicked.
EPILOGUE
Ottawa and Michael P. Murphy transition back into the solar system sixteen hours later. We set course for Daedalus Fleet Yard and the ride home, which won’t be as fast as our express passage through the solar system a few days ago because Murphy can’t keep up with the battlecarrier at full speed. That gives me seven days of thinking time, and I don’t mind that at all right now.
The civilians are quartered on our running track, so there’s no running laps for the remainder of our deployment. On the second day of our transit to Gateway, I go up to the track nonetheless, to go see someone I know.
The ice miners and engineers have managed to adapt to their temporary living arrangements with admirable speed and thoroughness. We’ve issued everyone field shelters and sleeping bags from the ship’s SI equipment inventory, and they’ve used it to make an orderly tent city on the kilometer-long running track. The shelters take up one lane of the track, and the New Svalbarders left the other lane open to facilitate easy movement. They organized screen dividers from somewhere on the ship to have some sections of the tent city walled off for privacy. All in all, it looks remarkably well organized for a makeshift refugee camp that has to share the head and showers of the attached gym among almost two thousand people.
Constable Guest is easy to find wherever he goes. His family has set up their shelters in the far bend of the track. When I come around the bend, he is standing by his open shelter, engrossed in conversation with two other colonists. He gives me a friendly wave when he sees me coming around the loop.
“How do you like your temporary digs?” I ask.
“It’s not bad at all, actually. Kind of cozy when you close the flap. Like going camping.” He gestures to the shelters next to his. “Wife and daughters are off to the mess hall to get some lunch. They love the food on this ship. I may have a hard time weaning them off it again.”
“I’m not going to tell you it’s as good everywhere in the solar system. When’s the last time you’ve been back to Earth?”
“Ten years. Before all that Lanky business. The kids have never been. They are New Svalbard born and bred. I still haven’t told them that we can’t go back, but they know. They’re smarter than me by half.”
“No, there’s no going back,” I say. “We made sure of that before we left.”
“Nukes?”
I nod. “Twenty megatons, underground burst.”
“Yeah, it’s as gone as gone can get, then.” He sighs.
“Are you going to be okay?” I ask.
“Yeah. I’ll be fine. I have colonial law enforcement certification. I’ll apply for a new job with the Colonial Administration. Not that we have a lot of colonies left. Push comes to shove, I’ll go private and do mining security or something. It was time for a change anyway.”
“How do you think your girls will handle Earth?”
“They’re coming from a place with ten thousand people on it, and they’re going to a place that has a hundred billion. I think it’ll be a bit of a culture shock. But they’ll adapt.”
“I wish I could refer you to someone, but I don’t know anyone important in the civilian administration. But if you need anything while you’re on this ship, let me know. Just ask for the STO.”
Constable Guest extends his hand, and I shake it firmly.
“Thank you, Captain Grayson. For what you did back on New Svalbard. And for helping us again.”
“Andrew,” I say.
“I’m Matthew,” he says. “And wherever we end up, you’re welcome anytime.”
“I will take you up on that.”
I shake his hand again and make my way back around the bend and toward the gym. I like the big, friendly constable, and I am a little shamed by his gratitude and his offer of friendship. All the corps has ever done for him was to turn his colony into a battleground and then nuke it into oblivion. We are damn sure not in the helping business, no matter what the recruiting vids say.
On the way back to Daedalus, I notice a profound change in the atmosphere on board, even more drastic than the attitude jolt the crew got when it was clear that we were headed for battle. There’s less chatter in the passageways, less laughter at mealtime in the officer’s wardroom, and even the RecFac is quieter. I recognize the mood because it’s common among grunts after battle. A large percentage of Ottawa’s crew were green before this deployment, and nobody really expected to see action on a shakedown cruise. Now they’ve seen battle, felt the stress and the fear of death, pushed the buttons that launched the warheads. Whatever happens next, I know that none of the junior enlisted on this ship will ever slack off during an Abandon Ship drill again. But it’s the SI grunts who bore the true burden of this battle, especially the seventy-two members of the Seventh Spaceborne Infantry Regime
nt who are making the transit home to Gateway in airtight and fluid-resistant olive-green Fleet body bags.
There’s a funeral ceremony for our SI and Fleet fallen the day after our transition back into the solar system. It’s not a real funeral because the Fleet will deliver the bodies of the dead to their families for proper incineration and burial, but the ceremony is tradition because it gives their comrades a chance to say good-bye properly. The disposable coffins with the dead pilots and troopers are lined up on the flight deck in seven neat rows of twelve. Each coffin has an NAC flag draped over it and a little easel with a picture of the lost trooper and their hometown and awards underneath.
I didn’t check the casualty lists right after the battle because I had other things on my mind. I haven’t seen Hansen since we left, and I wrote it off to the fact that we no longer have a running track on which to bump into each other. Maybe I didn’t want to check the lists even after everything calmed down after the battle because I was afraid of what I would find. But right before the ceremony, when we have time to walk the rows of coffins to say our private good-byes to friends and comrades, I see her picture on one of those easels, and it’s like someone parked a fully loaded drop ship square on my chest.
Nicole Anna Hansen was born in a ’burber enclave near Atlanta, and she was only a month older than me. She served in the Territorial Army and then the Spaceborne Infantry, climbing all the way to the rank of captain. In her nine-year service career, she received three Bronze Stars, two Purple Hearts, a Silver Star, and a bucket of other awards. She died on New Svalbard, a backwater ice moon in the Fomalhaut system, holding the airfield perimeter at New Longyearbyen with the command platoon of her company until the Lankies broke through and wiped out half the platoon not a hundred meters from the spot where my squad emerged on the surface to lead the civilians to the waiting drop ships. She died to defend a moon that would be turned into a frozen radioactive wasteland a little over an hour later. She died so nineteen hundred civilians could make it off, doing what the grunts in the SI are trained to do. We were squad mates once, and we both almost bought it in that bloody and furious night in Detroit eight years ago. If her career went anything like mine, we both rolled the dice a few hundred times in those eight years. And now her number came up, and my old squad mate—what’s left of her—is riding home for the last time, back to a family who doesn’t even know about the grief that’s about to consume their lives. And I am here, reading her obituary printout and learning things about her I should have known for years.
I run my fingers over her portrait and feel the tears burning in my eyes. Maybe this hurts so much because she was the only trooper I’ve known for as long as I’ve known Halley, and because I liked her from the beginning. And maybe it’s because I know that it could be me or Halley in that coffin just as easily. Maybe Hansen’s death is such a gut punch because it shows me once again that life in the corps is random and capricious, that there are no guarantees any of us will make it through this.
I spend the rest of the deployment mostly with Halley in my time off. We alternate staterooms every night and bunk together, in continued flagrant violation of regulations. We are officers and understand the need for obedience in a military organization, but we are also husband and wife, and we’re in our early thirties. Maybe it’s the experience that comes from having lived through this war together for ten years, or the knowledge that finding and keeping someone who fits you is harder than almost anything when you’re serving. But it seems to us a pointless dumbshit rule that has a married couple sleeping in separate parts of a ship when their jobs have them risking their lives almost every fucking day. There are seventy-two of our comrades down on the flight deck who can’t live out their lives anymore, and if nothing else, I feel that we owe it to them to live our own the best way we can.
“What would you do if we weren’t in the Fleet anymore?” I ask Halley one evening as we get comfortable in the confines of her bunk.
“What do you mean? What are we going to do when we retire? I thought we had that all sorted out.”
“No, not that. I mean quitting the service. Resigning our commissions.”
Halley props her head up and looks at me quizzically.
“You are not serious about that. Lose the retirement bonus? And the health care?”
“We’d still get the payout, just without the bonus. It would still be enough to do something else with our lives.”
“What brought that on?” she asks.
“This big bucket of shit,” I say and knock against the bulkhead with my fist. “The Destroyonator class.”
“What about it?”
“We have all this shiny new tech. Most advanced ship in the Fleet. And it’s still built around the old battle plan. What are we going to use it for? Going after Lankies outside of the solar system? We just tried that, and we couldn’t even defend a single one-town colony. What’s the point? Once they have settled on a colony, they flip the atmosphere anyway and tear down all our terraformers. We’re never getting those colonies back, with or without Avengers.”
Halley doesn’t reply. Instead, she just looks at me with an ever so slight smile on her lips.
“But you know they’re going to use them because they’re there. And because it’s the fucking plan. So we’ll spend the next ten years hopscotching between a bunch of interstellar graveyards until we bite off more than even a Destroyonator can chew.”
I roll over onto my back and look at the paint on the deck above Halley’s stateroom.
“Ten years,” I repeat. “We’ll be forty when we get out. If we get out. If we don’t end up in a coffin on some flight deck. Or as frozen carbon particles in hard vacuum over some shit moon at the ass end of space.”
“So you want to just drop everything and move into the mountains of Vermont?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Or do something else. Have some time to figure it out. And spend time with you.”
I turn to face her again.
“We’ve been married for ten years. How much time have we had together? Six months?”
“Probably less.”
“Yeah. And I really want to see what it’s like to have a life with you. Not just spending two weeks a year on leave.”
“The corps needs experienced people, Andrew. Half the force is green. We can’t just quit and leave them hanging.”
“I think we’ve done our share. And the green ones did all right at Mars. We did, too, when we were green.”
“Oh God, can you even imagine just being a civilian again?” Halley says. “Sleeping in every day for a month. Eating meals that don’t get served on a plastic tray. Going out for a two-day hike just because you fucking feel like it. Not having to worry about that infernal PDP going off in your pocket, telling you the world’s about to end, and would you please show up for your first-row seats?”
“They need pilots in the civilian world, too, you know.”
“I don’t know, Andrew,” she says. “I’ll need time to think about that. What on Earth brought that on anyway?”
I’m silent for a little while. Halley bumps my shoulder lightly with her fist.
“Hmm? Come on, spill the beans.”
“It’s the guy I knew back in New Svalbard,” I say. “Big constable, named Guest.”
“What about him?”
“He made it off the rock with his family. They’re up in Tent City on the running track right now. Wife, two daughters. And they just lost their home. His job for the last fifteen years. Their whole lives. And he shrugs it off because his family made it out with him, and they are with him. We just nuked his hometown. And he has already come to terms with having to start over. Because they matter more to him than his job or his home.”
Now it’s Halley’s turn to stay silent for a bit.
“Must be nice,” she says after a while.
“Yeah,” I agree. “Must be.”
For the last half million klicks, we get an escort from the Fleet. News of our res
cue of the settlers of New Svalbard has traveled faster than Ottawa, and the Networks are sinking their teeth into the juicy red meat of this particular story. So we glide into Gateway instead of Daedalus, exactly three and a half months after we left for our shakedown cruise, and nineteen days after our return from the Fomalhaut system. The two Hammerhead cruisers that accompany Ottawa and Michael P. Murphy into the berths have the new high-visibility paint scheme and full Christmas tree lights blinking, to give the myriad of news cameras on the observation deck of Gateway something to see. We haven’t had any victories to celebrate in the last three years, and I suspect that the rescue of a colony from annihilation is going to be used as proof that the money for the Avengers was well spent.
After a two-day stretch of debriefings, medical checkups, press tours, and visits by what seems like every general officer in the corps, the entire crew of Ottawa is granted a special five-day leave, sandwiched between two weekends for a total of nine days of liberty. As officers, Halley and I are among the first group to leave the ship, and we successfully dodge most of the reporters and curious brass waiting for us out in the main concourse to hitch a ride down to Earth at the transfer desk.
“Where do you need to be?” the sergeant at the desk asks as he checks his shuttle schedules. From the way he glances at us when he thinks we’re not paying attention, I can tell that he’s not familiar with the new blueberry uniforms.
“Burlington,” we both say at the same time.
“NCAS Burlington,” he repeats. “Shuttle 802, departs at 0700 from docking collar Bravo 95.”
“Thank you, Sergeant,” Halley says.