by Marko Kloos
Dmitry and I walk down the ramp and onto solid ground for the first time in almost a month. I suppress the urge to kneel down and kiss the frigid concrete, which would probably cost me my lips. Dmitry shoulders his kit bag and nods at me.
“Good luck, Andrew. I do not think I will see you again.”
I hold out my good hand, and he shakes it firmly.
“Good luck, Dmitry,” I say. “See you on the battlefield some day. Hopefully on the same side.”
“Is not likely. But I will not forget what you did. You come defect to Alliance, I put in good word for you. Maybe even make you senior sergeant.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Do svidaniya,” he says. Then he turns to walk toward the waiting Akula parked across the landing pad.
There’s plenty of activity on the airfield, but I don’t see any familiar faces here to meet me. I walk into the control building and down to the access tunnel that leads to the Ellipse, a kilometer and a half away, and start walking, grateful for the solitude and the opportunity to stretch my legs.
The Ellipse is as busy as it was when I left New Longyearbyen a month ago. Civilian ice miners and their families are mingling with soldiers in Homeworld Defense uniforms and the occasional Spaceborne Infantry smock. There’s music coming from some of the vendor stalls, and I can smell fried food in the air down here, a scent that makes my stomach lurch. Food vendors down here either mean that the supply situation isn’t desperate yet, or the official supply is bad enough to spur black-market demand. I know a thing or two about economics in a shortage zone from my formative years trading stolen shit in the PRC back home.
I make my way through the foot traffic, feeling vaguely out of place in my bulky hardshell battle armor, and head for the admin center, which is naturally almost at the opposite end of the Ellipse from the terminus of the airfield access tunnel.
Chief Constable Guest’s office is one of the first rooms beyond the entry vestibule of the admin center. The door is open, and when I peek inside, the constable is behind his desk. He has his humongous boots propped up on the desk, and there’s a data pad on his lap. He sees me in the doorway and does a little double take.
“How do you even get boots in that size?” I ask. “I swear, I’ve seen armored vehicles with narrower tracks.”
“Special order. Takes six months to get a pair from Earth. Well, used to, anyway.” Constable Guest puts down his data pad and swings his legs off the desktop. Then he gets out of his chair and comes over to the door.
“Good to see you back,” he says. “I knew Indy was entering orbit, but I figured it’d be another three or four hours before they send a drop ship down.” He looks at my bandaged hand and raises an eyebrow. “That doesn’t look too good.”
“It’s not great,” I say. “I’ll have to take my boots off in the future whenever I have to count to ten.”
“See a doc about that yet?”
“We sort of had to leave Gateway in a hurry. I’ve had the corpsman on Indy look at it.”
“You still need to go and have one of our docs fix you up. The clinic is down here on the ground floor, at the end of Hallway C and to the right.”
“I’ll go see ’em soon enough,” I say. “No hurry. Fingers are gone, no going back on that. Have you seen Sergeant Fallon around?” I ask, partially to change the subject.
Constable Guest scratches the top of his head. “Check the ops center. If she’s not there, she’s probably either up in the science section with Dr. Stewart, or over at On the Rocks. Also with Dr. Stewart.”
“What is Master Sergeant Fallon doing with the head of your science mission? Is she getting some schooling in astrophysics?”
Constable Guest smiles and shakes his head. “I think their mutual interests are more in the field of chemistry. Distillation, to be specific.”
I leave my armor in a corner of Constable Guest’s office next to the rack holding his well-worn M-66 carbine in its DNA-locked safety clamp. Then I walk over to the ops center and stick my head into the room, but it’s mostly empty except for three civvies and two troopers in HD uniforms I don’t know. Dr. Stewart’s office in the science section is empty as well except for an impressive amount of clutter on her desk that looks like a scientific experiment on the limits of static design. I jog down the staircase to the underground passage into the Ellipse, eager to catch up with my friend and former squad leader.
On the Rocks is noisy and a bit raucous. There are tables and chairs on the outside of the bar taking up space on the Ellipse, and people are drinking and talking out here at a volume that can be heard fifty meters beyond the nearest bend. I make my way through the little maze of tables and walk into the bar, which is packed to the last table. The people here are mostly civilian workers. A few of the tables have soldiers sitting at them, most in Homeworld Defense uniforms. The soldier and civvie tables are segregated except for one table in the corner of the room. Sergeant Fallon sits with her back to the wall, facing the door, engrossed in conversation with Dr. Stewart. I walk up to the table, and she looks up when she notices my presence.
“Andrew,” she says. Then she gets up from her chair and gives me a fierce one-armed hug that squeezes the air out of my lungs. “I am ridiculously glad that you aren’t dead.”
“That makes two of us,” I say, and she laughs. From the way she has to steady herself very slightly before letting go of me tells me that whatever distillation-related business she has been practicing with Dr. Stewart has been going on for a little while already.
“Sit, and have a goddamn drink, Staff Sergeant Grayson. That’s an order.”
She sits back down and pushes back a chair for me. Dr. Stewart watches our little glad-you’re-back exchange with wry amusement.
“Janet,” I say. “Good to see you again.”
“And you, Andrew. How was the trip to Earth?”
“I’ve had more fun,” I say. Then I sit down on the offered chair and hold up my bandaged hand. “But we got it done. In a fashion.”
“Never doubted it,” Sergeant Fallon says. “What happened to the hand?”
“Civilian security cop on Independence shot off two fingers. It’s a long story.”
“Well, we have nothing but time,” Sergeant Fallon says. She gets up from her chair again and pats my shoulder as she squeezes past me. “Talk amongst yourselves while I go and get us another round. And then you’ll tell me what went down on that mission.”
The first Shockfrost cocktail goes down smoothly and quickly, so I chase it with another. My hand is aching again, that unpleasant deep and painful throbbing that comes with deep tissue damage, and I use the last third of the second glass to wash down a pair of Corpsman Randall’s little chemical helpers. Then I run Sergeant Fallon and Dr. Stewart through the events of the mission from my perspective. By the time I am finished, the alcohol has warmed me up considerably, and the painkillers have started to deliver the goods.
“We got the big picture from the post-op briefings your skipper sent back. They’ve had a bunch of meetings about it already. My God, so much talking. And it’s all like a snake biting its own tail. Never gets anywhere.” Sergeant Fallon takes a sip from her own drink.
“What’s the story on Midway? When did they rejoin the party?”
Sergeant Fallon’s expression darkens. “That chickenshit fuckstick of a reservist,” she says. “We sent them messages constantly after you left. They were all the way in deep space, trying to map a sublight path back to Earth, as if they had thirty years’ worth of reactor fuel with them. Week or so ago, they came limping back with dry water tanks. And get this: The task force CO tries to claim command. Of all the Commonwealth units in the system. Because he has a golden wreath and a star on his shoulder boards, see.”
“Bet that went over well,” I say.
“Oh, yeah. Regulus Actual told him to go piss up a rope. Not in so many words, of course. Turns out the general spent three weeks in his cabin, never once stepped into the CIC. Ha
d the surgeon write him a chit and claimed health issues. He had the XO bring him his meals to the flag cabin. Personally. His XO relieved him of command and locked him in his cabin for good. No word on whether he got a spanking or two on top of that.”
I don’t want to laugh—the one-star jackass in question cost us several drop ships and thirty lives with his orders—but the mental image of the reservist general with his CDU pants around his ankles getting his ass beaten by the senior NCO makes me crack up nonetheless.
“Anyway, they came back and rejoined the orbital parade, and we’ve all just been a big, happy, dysfunctional family ever since,” Sergeant Fallon says. “Nothing too exciting. Nothing like what you guys went through.”
“So who’s in charge now?”
“We do shit by committee right now. The COs of the HD battalions are in command down here. We get together on video-conference with all the COs in orbit once a day to chitchat. Patrol assignments, replenishments, that sort of thing. Bores me to tears. But I guess talking’s better than shooting at each other.”
“Anything’s better than shooting at each other,” I say, and look at my bandaged hand.
“Don’t worry too much about that,” Sergeant Fallon says. “They can do miracles with body-replacement cybernetics these days. Ask me how I know.”
I don’t really want to talk about our brief stay near Earth anymore, because every time I think about it, I have to consider just how close I was to getting off Indy and over to Luna. Just one drop-ship ride, ten minutes of transit, and I would have been breathing the same air as Halley. Instead, I am back here at the ass end of the settled universe, in a crummy little bar on a frigid little moon, and there are once again twenty-eight light-years and God knows how many Lanky ships between me and her. But I don’t want to tell my companions that this is what’s on my mind. I don’t know Dr. Stewart well enough to share these personal concerns, and bitching about not having seen my fiancée and missing a few fingers would seem like self-indulgent whining sitting next to a woman who lost her leg in combat and who got stranded here by her own command, exiled from Earth altogether. So I do the only prudent thing left to do for someone in my place at this point in time, with the resources at my disposal.
I hold up my empty glass and turn it in my hand. “You think I can get another one of these, maybe?”
CHAPTER 20
When I wake up the next morning, it feels like someone clubbed me in the head with a rifle butt last night.
I’m in a bunk, and I’m still wearing my fatigues, but the room around me is absolutely unfamiliar. I sit up—slowly—and try to orient myself while the room around me is not only spinning slightly, but also drifting in and out of focus.
My boots are by the side of the bunk, neatly parked side by side, and my fatigue tunic is neatly draped over the back of a nearby chair. The room I’m in is pretty austere, almost as sterile as a shipboard berth on a fleet vessel. There’s an open door on one wall that leads into a small bathroom, and I heave myself out of the bunk to do my morning business and restore some of my cognitive and sensory functions.
I’m in the middle of washing up when the door on the other side opens, and Master Sergeant Fallon walks in.
“Good morning,” she says when she sees me swaying in front of the sink in the bathroom. “How are you feeling?”
“Like hammered shit,” I croak.
“You wouldn’t listen when I told you that the fifth Shockfrost cocktail was a bad idea. You’re quite a bit heavier than you look, by the way.”
“Did you drag me here all by yourself?” I grab a towel from a nearby rack and start blotting my face dry. “Where is ‘here,’ anyway?”
“My quarters,” she says. “You didn’t have assigned quarters yet, and you were in no shape to request them from the civvies. Looks like you came straight to the bar from the landing pad. I can appreciate a soldier who has his priorities so clearly in order.”
“Well, I stopped by the ops center first,” I say. “Left my armor with the constable.” I look over at the bunk, which is a standard military folding cot. “Wait. If I slept on that, where did you sleep?”
“Next to you, dipshit. Floor’s too fucking hard.” She chuckles when she sees my surprised and mildly embarrassed expression. “Don’t worry, lightweight. I was pretty drunk myself. There was no funny business. You were a booze corpse, and I don’t poach among the junior NCOs anyway. Especially not the almost-married ones.”
She picks up my tunic and throws it in my direction.
“Get dressed and pop some headache meds,” she says. “Conference with the CO committee in fifteen. Looks like we’re going home soon.”
The conference call takes place in the admin center’s meeting rooms. From the efficient and routine way everything gets set up and prepared, it’s pretty clear that everyone involved has had plenty of practice since Indy set out for Earth. I take a seat on the long side of the big conference table in the room, next to Sergeant Fallon. The COs of the two HD battalions, Lieutenant Colonels Decker and Kemp, are sitting across from me, along with their senior NCOs. On our side of the meeting, the civilian administrator and Dr. Stewart round out the group. The far wall of the room is set up with a large holoscreen that is split ten ways to show the feeds from all the other participants. I see Colonel Campbell on one of the screen segments, standing in the well-familiar CIC pit on Indy, with Major Renner by his side and slightly behind him, and I feel a vague sense of abandonment.
“Let me open by stating that if there’s still a military administration when we get back to Earth, I am recommending you for the Medal of Honor, Colonel Campbell,” Colonel Aguilar says over the feed from Regulus’s CIC. “You and your crew have pulled off an impossible mission, and we are all indebted to Indianapolis for your skill and bravery.”
“I appreciate the sentiment, Colonel Aguilar. But we scouted out the solar system as ordered, no more and no less. And considering the way we left, they may give me a firing squad before they hang that medal around my neck.”
“We will sort out that situation when we show up in Earth orbit with a three-carrier strike force,” Colonel Aguilar replies.
“Our supply situation is critical,” the senior SRA officer says. General Park looks tired, and the shadows on his face make his angular features even more prominent. “Our fuel is not so bad, but our rations are low. We are at fifteen percent of reserves. That is a week and a half at best.”
“We aren’t doing any better,” Colonel Aguilar responds. “Ten thousand troops to feed on the ground every day without bleeding the colony dry. We’re down to sweeping up the crumbs over on Portsmouth. A week at the most. Then we’re down to emergency rations.”
“Then it is in our best interest to set the agreed-upon plan in motion as soon as feasible.”
“We agree, General Park. If you have no objections, we will prepare for departure and initiate the return to the solar system via the Alliance node within twenty-four hours. If you wish, we can level out the supply situation prior to departure and redistribute whatever is left among the Alliance and Commonwealth ships as needed.”
“That would be most appreciated,” Brigadier Park replies.
A new spirit of cooperation and courtesy, I think. Amazing how civilized we can be when there’s nothing left to shoot each other over.
“With the airlift capabilities we have left, we’ll need six to eight hours to get all the SD troops off the terraformers and onto the carrier,” Lieutenant Colonel Decker chimes in. “And that’s if the weather doesn’t shut down flight ops.”
“Then get those birds in the air as soon as you can,” Colonel Aguilar says.
“I want to unload my Homeworld Defense troopers on Regulus, sir. I know we came here on Midway, but they’ll need their space for the Spaceborne Infantry regiment from Camp Frostbite. I think it’s best if we don’t camp out on the same flight deck with the SI boys, considering what happened before you got here.”
“I have no issue wi
th that. Regulus has the bigger flight deck anyway, and we’re short on drop ships. You’ll have lots of elbow room.”
“What about you, Administrator?” Colonel Campbell asks. “How many civilians are you sending home with us?”
“Any that want to go. But I’ll tell you that it won’t be very many. We’re sort of set in our ways down here.”
“If the Lankies find you again, you may regret having passed up the chance.”
“If the Lankies find us again, we are going to ground and hope they’ll find the place too cold for their taste. From what info you brought back from Earth, I’d say we wouldn’t be any better off there right now.”
“That’s your decision to make, and we have no right to try to tell you otherwise. Make sure that any evacuees are ready for airlift up to the carriers by 1800 tonight at the latest,” Colonel Aguilar says.
“Understood,” the colony administrator says. “They’ll be there on time, whoever’s going.”
The commanding officers hash out details of our departure while I listen and try to ignore the throbbing pain in my temples. Apparently, the brass have started planning our return while Indy was still on her return leg to New Svalbard, but I have no idea how they’re planning to get past the seed ships on the other side of the Alliance node, and it’s not my place to ask in this particular meeting. All I know right now is that we are leaving for good within forty-eight hours, and that we are heading for unfriendly space again.
“You can stay, you know,” Sergeant Fallon says to me when we leave the conference room and walk back down to the ops center.
“Here? On New Svalbard?”
“The COs are giving the Homeworld Defense grunts the option to stay here and be a permanent part of the defense. Way we see it, the Commonwealth dumped them here for good. They have the right to decide for themselves.”
“What about you? Are you staying?”