by Marko Kloos
I walk into the briefing room and take a chair in the back, behind the SEAL team and on the opposite side of the room from the SI recon guys. The short and violent bloodshed during our mutiny on New Svalbard is still fresh in everyone’s memory, and some of the SI troopers have given me hostile glances or made unfriendly remarks in the mess hall on our weeklong ride here. Until we’re back in orbit above New Svalbard, I’ll be doing my best to avoid getting caught in some low-traffic corner of this ship with half a dozen pissed-off space apes between me and the exit hatch.
The SpecOps commander on the Regulus is a hard-faced major named Kelly. He has prematurely gray hair and the worn-out, hard-lived look common to veteran fleet SpecOps personnel. Our lifestyle is extremely taxing on our bodies and minds, and most lifers in our branch look at least ten years older than their actual age.
“That was a by-the-book ass-kicking,” he says when he starts the debriefing by firing up the holographic display on the wall. “Zero podhead casualties on this one. One hundred seventy-nine confirmed Lanky kills, and another fifty-some likelies.”
We all cheer our approval in the appropriate muted and professional fashion. That’s by far the highest nonnuclear Lanky body count any unit has ever racked up in a single drop, and we did most of it the old-fashioned way, on the ground, with rifles and rockets and automatic cannons.
“How many SI casualties? And, uh, SRA?” one of the SEALs asks.
“Nineteen KIA, twenty-some wounded,” the major replies. “Don’t have numbers for the Russians, but they had a lot fewer boots on the ground.”
“That’s not awful for a drop that size,” the lieutenant in charge of the SEAL team says. That is of course a massive understatement. We would have taken at least three times as many SI casualties just going up against an SRA garrison battalion or two. And nobody has ever gone up against the Lankies with an overstrength regiment from orbit, but the last time they showed up while we had a force that size on the ground, they wiped it out almost completely.
“ ‘Not awful’ is right,” Major Kelly says. “We just handed those skinny bastards a major ass-kicking going toe-to-toe, on their turf. If shit had gone half as well on the colonies the last few years, we’d have them on the run by now.”
“They were acting kind of odd,” I say, and most of the heads in the room swivel into my direction. “Anyone else notice that? They were nowhere near as aggressive as they usually are. Sluggish, almost.”
“Yeah,” the SEAL lieutenant says. “Like they were drowsy or something.”
“Maybe we got ’em demoralized,” one of the SI recon guys offers, and the SEAL lieutenant snorts a brief laugh.
“They were without their mother ship,” Major Kelly says. “Which is why they got their asses kicked, of course, but maybe there’s something else to that. Maybe they were short on something that went nova with that seed ship. Supplies? Who the fuck knows.”
“They didn’t have anything set up on the surface,” I say. “I went through all the recon data before and after the drop. Not a single Lanky terraformer, or whatever the fuck they call theirs. They didn’t even manage to tear down all the SRA stations, and that’s usually their first order of business. Two-thirds of the SRA terraforming network is still up and running down there.”
“If I had to guess?” Major Kelly says. “We blew up their chow and their building supplies when we took out their ship. There weren’t enough Lankies on the ground, either. Not for a colony takeover. There’s thousands of those things in a seed ship.”
“Those were just the advance recon team or something,” someone else in the room suggests. “Ship skips by the moon, dumps the advance team, goes gunning for that SRA cruiser, gets blown to shit by the New Svalbard people.”
“Advance team gets stranded without support on the SRA moon,” Major Kelly adds. “So we basically kicked their asses because they were underfed and aimless.”
The major’s statement hangs in the room for a moment like an unwelcome after-lunch fart. Nobody wants to think that our first major military success against the Lankies—heroic rescue of colonists!—was mostly due to the fact that the Lankies may have been too weak to put up a decent fight. Then Major Kelly shrugs and shakes his head.
“Whatever. Don’t really give a shit about the why and how. Most of our guys made it back, and most of theirs are full of holes. That’s a successful mission right there. Too bad it probably won’t make a damn bit of a difference in the long run. Go and relax, people. We have a six-day ride back to New Svalbard. May be the last R and R any of us get for a long time.”
Or for good, I think. I check my new loaner PDP for the date. It’s April 3, 2116, and I have less than three months to get back home to Earth if I don’t want to be late for my own wedding. I don’t know if Earth is still there, but I don’t even want to contemplate the possibility that Halley may not be there anymore. If this refugee United Nations strike force is going back to the solar system, I’m going, too.
The Regulus has state-of-the-art recreational facilities for its crew. I’ve seen a lot of fleet rec centers in my service—Halley and I usually get together at RecFacs whenever we have leave together, because we’re often too far away from Earth to make it back there before our leave time is up—and I can say that this one is the nicest I’ve seen yet. Still, I can’t get any enjoyment out of any of the offerings. It all seems so trite all of a sudden—simulators, canned Network shows bundled for fleet personnel who may be on deployment for a show’s entire Earthside run, pool and gaming holotables, and dozens of other ways for stressed-out warfighters to turn off their brains and find some diversion. All this stuff seems pointless now, with most of the fleet gone and the solar system under siege by a near-unbeatable enemy. I realize that I never liked the RecFacs anyway, and that I only ever enjoyed them because they were the only places where I got to spend some alone time with Halley in the private berths.
At least the place has sports facilities for team games and solitary workouts, so I use my downtime to sweat. There’s a running track that winds its way through the rec deck of the Regulus, and because it’s a big ship, it’s a long track, two kilometers of black rubberized decking with a fat white line running down the center, snaking through the many compartments. It’s quite possibly the height of vanity, considering the overall state of humanity right now, but sitting on New Svalbard, I put on a few extra pounds with the mess-hall chow at Camp Frostbite, and I want to be in the best possible shape when I see my fiancée again. There’s a better-than-even chance my once again trim body will be an expanding cloud of superheated debris in a few weeks, long before we get even within sight of Earth, but running is a good thing to do right now. It feels normal, and I can stand some of that at the moment, because everything else doesn’t.
I don’t belong on this ship. I have a loaner berth and a loaner armor set, but I don’t know a soul on the Regulus. The SI troopers from the Midway who embarked with me on this drop are quartered in the section of the ship that usually hosts the Regulus’s own SI regiment. I took a berth in the NCO quarters of the fleet section, well away from the Midway grunts, and with the Regulus running a skeleton crew, it’s a pretty quiet run back to New Svalbard. For the first time in weeks, I don’t have access to an all-seeing ship network or external sensor arrays, and I’m just another passenger. I sleep, I eat, I work out, and I go out of my way not to have to talk to anyone except the occasional SEAL or Spaceborne Rescue podhead in line for chow. When we arrive back in orbit over New Svalbard after six days of boring and uneventful interplanetary cruise, I’m so bored that I almost wish we had another Lanky on our tail and just a few days to find a way to kill it.
“You look like you need some of the local rotgut,” Sergeant Fallon says by way of greeting when I walk down the ramp of the Regulus drop ship that ferried me down to New Svalbard’s airfield. The weather has gotten a lot worse in the week I was gone. The snowdrifts by the sides of the squat hangars nearby are four or five meters high, and the
re’s a sixty-knot polar wind blowing across the open space and whipping the snow sideways. Sergeant Fallon is in her battle armor, which is ice-caked, and she only raises her visor briefly when she walks up to me to help me with my gear.
“That’s some grade-A shit weather,” I say to her. “Shuttle got delayed three hours waiting for a break in the storm.”
“This isn’t a storm,” she says. “This is fucking balmy. You can actually see ahead for more than ten meters. Everything has moved underground. And I mean everything. The whole town. Did you know they have a whole damn recreation district underground?”
“No, I did not know that.”
“They call it the Ellipse. Come on, stow your new toys, and I’ll take you down to the bar. They have a thing called a Shockfrost cocktail. I don’t know what’s in it, but it will make you think you can arm-wrestle a Lanky.”
The Ellipse is an underground concourse that makes a loop underneath a large chunk of New Svalbard. Sergeant Fallon leads me around like a tour guide. All the bunker-like houses on the surface have secondary subterranean exits that lead to neighborhood tunnels, and all of those tunnels converge on the Ellipse. In the winter months, when nobody can spend much time on the surface in hundred-knot polar winds, life moves underground on New Svalbard.
The tunnel that makes up the Ellipse is twenty meters or more in diameter. I always wondered where the settlers of New Svalbard have their shops and pubs and where social life happens, and now I have my answer. Colonial economies are rough and basic, much like the black markets in the PRC back home, and a lot about the Ellipse and its warrens of shops and vendor stalls reminds me of life back home before I joined the service.
“You going to tell me about the drop with our new pals, or what?” Sergeant Fallon asks as we stride down the concourse, which has many more colonists milling around on it than I’ve ever seen on the surface streets here in New Longyearbyen. The locals are ice miners, hydroponic farmers, engineers, aviation service crews, and their families. Occasionally, we pass HD troopers from our newly minted New Svalbard Territorial Army, who give us respectful nods or salute Sergeant Fallon outright. Regardless of prior rank structures, we are both part of the small group who was in charge of the mutiny a few weeks ago, when Sergeant Fallon and her exiled Homeworld Defense troopers refused to follow orders to seize colonial assets. The resulting battle with the hardheaded elements of the Spaceborne Infantry cost us nearly forty casualties on both sides, along with several aviation assets we could ill afford to write off, not with so few humans in the Fomalhaut system, most of them dug into a moon with very few military assets of its own.
“Best drop I’ve ever done, really,” I say. “By-the-book planetary assault, few casualties, all mission goals accomplished. You should have been there. Could have gotten some trigger time against the Lankies in. Those Russian marines do not fuck around, let me tell you.”
“Oh, I have no doubt. I met a few of them at Dalian during that lovely proxy battle we fought with the SRA. ’Course, they were in sterile uniforms back then. Svalbard Accords and all.”
I don’t know a lot of Sergeant Fallon’s service history before I met her five years ago in the Territorial Army’s 365th Autonomous Infantry Battalion, but I do know from my former squad mates that the Battle of Dalian was where she earned her Medal of Honor. I know it was a police action that went south and filled a lot of TA body bags, but the official history is fuzzy on the details, which probably means that we technically or brazenly violated a treaty or three.
“You have to tell me about that one of these days,” I say.
Sergeant Fallon just smirks. “Andrew, the level of alcohol I need to drink to start telling details about Dalian pretty much guarantees that I won’t be able to recall those details. Speaking of alcohol . . . here we are. Welcome to On the Rocks.”
She points to a shop front that takes up about twenty meters of the tunnel wall up ahead on our right. In most other settings, the fake blown-glass windows and the obviously resin-molded knobby tree trunks that decorate the front of the establishment would be tacky, but down here it’s a welcome splash of colorful kitsch in a place where most everything else is the color of ice and grimy concrete.
“This,” Sergeant Fallon says, “is the best bar in New Longyearbyen. And believe me, I’ve had lots of time to try them all while you were gone playing Superhero Space Commando.”
The interior of the place carries on the design cues from the outside. There’s no wood on New Svalbard, so the furniture is sturdy polymer molded to look like it has been carved from weathered driftwood. There are fake tree trunks on the walls, and the spaces between them have been adorned with murals by an artist long on enthusiasm and short on talent. It sort of looks like it’s supposed to resemble a medieval tavern, and it falls well short of achieving that goal, but after weeks of looking at steel bulkheads and nonslip flooring, the visual clutter is a welcome distraction.
“I didn’t know you drank,” I say to Sergeant Fallon when we sit down to claim one of the little round plastic tables in the back of the place.
“I do,” she says. “Just not the shitty soy beer they serve back in the RecFacs. That stuff tastes like carbonated piss. I like a good black-market whisky. Real beer, too, but that stuff is too expensive for my pay grade.”
“Never had any,” I reply. “Just the stuff they sell back home in the PRC. Purple Haze, Orange Crush, Blue Angel.” I chuckle at the memory of my first forays into intoxication when I was a teenager. “Positively awful shit. Flavored with the fruity juice powder from the BNA packets, to cover up the taste from whatever piping they used to distill it. Still tasted like battery acid, just like fruit-flavored battery acid.”
“Not too long before you joined us at Shughart in the 365th, we had a drop into the ’burbs somewhere in Kentucky,” Sergeant Fallon says. “Near the Lexington metroplex. Way out in the gentrified area. Some hood rats jacked a hydrobus and drove out from PRC Lexington to stir some shit and redistribute themselves some wealth. Small drop, just a platoon, to help out the local cops. We flushed the hood rats out of one of the real-currency food stores. They’d eaten as much as they could and got piss drunk, and then they trashed the rest.”
She looks over at the fake stained-glass windows that also adorn the interior walls, and her voice trails off as she recalls the memory.
“The middle-class ’burbers, they know how to live. When we had the last of the hood rats hog-tied and packed up for transport to the detention center, I had a look around for leftovers. They had a back stockroom, secured like a damn bank vault. I cracked the lock to check for stragglers, and there was this stash of high-dollar luxury goods in there. For extra-special customers with deep pockets, I’m guessing. Saw a bottle that said ‘Single Malt’ on it, liberated it, and took it back to Shughart in one of my empty mag pouches.”
Sergeant Fallon looks at me, and her expression turns very slightly dreamy for a moment. “You’ve never had anything like that in your life, Andrew. Proper single malt Scotch, from actual Scotland. Not made from soy or recycled piss or whatever. Aged in a fucking wood barrel for fourteen years, then sat on a shelf in some middle-class asshole’s private stash for a few more. So simple and clean, and so complex at the same time. All that work and time, just for someone to sip slowly and enjoy. Pure decadence.”
“Did you share any with the rest of the squad?” I ask.
“No, I didn’t. I kept it all for myself. Took me a month to finish that bottle. And I have no regrets.”
I grin at this casual admission of a court-martial-level offense. Truth is, it doesn’t seem that bad anymore, not after what happened since we arrived in the Fomalhaut system a few weeks ago. We’ve done far more subversive stuff since then, and a stolen bottle of liquor barely makes a dent the ledger now, even if that bottle probably cost more than I made in my first nine months in the military.
The bar isn’t very busy. There are a few locals sitting at tables and chatting, mostly ice miners and e
ngineers clad in blue overalls, waterproof adaptive nanofiber jackets hanging over chair backs. There’s music playing at moderate volume, some ancient K-pop tunes that were already oldies when I was in public grade school.
“What’s it going to be today?”
The girl that walks up next to our table with an empty tray in one hand and a towel in the other looks to be all of sixteen years old. She’s wearing beige overalls and a thermal vest that’s a particularly vivid shade of purple.
“Bring us two Shockfrosts, Allie,” Sergeant Fallon says. “My friend here hasn’t tried one yet.”
“Got it,” Allie says. She takes a small handheld scanner off her belt. Sergeant Fallon pulls her dog tags out from underneath her uniform tunic and holds them out for Allie, who scans them with a quick and practiced motion. Then Allie wipes down the table perfunctorily and walks off toward the bar.
“Payment system?” I ask, and nod at the dog tags. Sergeant Fallon nods.
“They keep track of who buys what. Normally they run accounts every month when they get a data link via courier. With the network closed, they’re probably sitting on two or three months’ worth right now. I don’t think timely accounting matters much at the moment anyway.”
“This is what you’ve been doing? Trying out all the watering holes in this place and running your government account dry?”
“I wish,” Sergeant Fallon says. “Most of my time I’ve been too busy trying to figure out how to keep two battalions’ worth of bored grunts from killing themselves or each other. Flight ops are cut back because of the weather, so we haven’t been able to keep up with the rotation. We were going to cycle the platoons at the terraformers through New Longyearbyen every other week, but the puddle jumpers can’t fly in this kind of weather. It’s a miracle anyone can live in this place at all. We are a hardy species.”