by Marko Kloos
She shakes her head and takes another sip from her bottle.
“Don’t tell me you put in for a transfer to a combat billet, Lear.”
I take her shrug as an affirmative response.
“Shit,” I say. “Thought you were the smart one. You want to go back into the Fleet right now? Shipboard duty? You’re MP, right?”
Sergeant Lear nods. “Master-at-arms.”
“Are you out of your mind? You know how many ships we’ve lost in the last year and a half?”
“Most of the Fleet,” she says.
“Most of the Fleet,” I repeat. “And that includes almost all the good hardware. They’re dragging fifty-year-old frigates out of mothballs and reactivating them with reserve crews and new sailors that have never done an Alcubierre transition. And they need all the atomic warheads for the Orion missiles, so most of the old shit buckets have empty missile tubes right now. You want to trade the fresh air and the weekends off for standing watch in a leaky relic that makes figure eights in orbit just to reassure the civvies on the ground?”
“That’s my job,” she says. “It’s what I trained for. Not this drill instructor stuff. I’m happy standing watch in a leaky relic. I’m a Fleet sailor. I’ve done my time on the ground in the fresh air. And home’s too far for two-day leave anyway, so I just sit here in the NCO club or ride out to Salt Lake on the weekends. I’m bored absolutely shitless.”
I chuckle, and she raises an eyebrow.
“Now that last part I believe,” I say. “You being bored. Not the soymeal paste about you rather being up there than down here. Nobody in their right mind likes watch rotation on a ship over weekends off and eight hours of uninterrupted sleep every night.”
Sergeant Lear shrugs again, but this time with a slight smile.
“You got me there. But don’t you feel the same? I mean, don’t you itch to get back in the field again sometimes? Knowing that it can all turn to shit in a moment if you don’t do your job right?”
I glance at my beer bottle, and my left hand that is idly turning it with just the fingertips. The prosthetics docs at Great Lakes were able to make my hand look like a proper hand again, but the time after our dash back to New Svalbard had been too long, and the damage from the contact salvo too great. The little and ring fingers on my left hand move with the impulses my brain sends over the artificial nerve conduits, and they bend and flex like their biological counterparts, but I have no feeling in them whatsoever other than a coarse sense of temperature and pressure. The replacement is extremely well done, but I can still tell the transition between the real, living part of the hand and the artificial addition. The skin has the same tone and texture, but something about it is just slightly off, and always will be.
“No,” I say, and continue to turn the beer bottle. “I don’t itch for that. Not anymore.”
There’s something in Sergeant Lear’s expression that almost looks like pity for a moment. Then she lets out a slow breath and leans back in her chair.
“Maybe you’re right. Maybe I’m nuts for wanting to go combat again. But I’m tired of this place. Another six months of this, and I’ll be a raging alcoholic.”
“You can’t,” I say, and lift the bottle off the table a few centimeters. “Not with this shit. Trust me on that one.”
I look at Sergeant Lear, and I’m once again struck by how young she is. Not really in the chronological sense—I only have five years on her at the most—but in appearance. She’s had four years of service, but she’s in a support specialty, not a frontline combat job. She looks tired, but so do all the other instructors after another twelve-week boot camp training flight of getting up at 0400, going to bed at 2200 or later, and lots of physical and mental stress in between. But she lacks the shopworn look of the grunts. She doesn’t have early gray hairs interleaved in that tightly strung ponytail of hers. She doesn’t have the wrinkles in the corner of her eyes. And she doesn’t have that hallmark of men and women who have seen too much awful stuff, the thousand-yard stare. She doesn’t look weary.
I sigh and drain the rest of my beer. Then I put the bottle down and drum a little cadence on the tabletop with my fingertips—three live, two numb. It feels like when your hand has fallen asleep, only without that painful prickle of feeling returning after a few minutes.
“Tell you what, Lear. If you want to put in for a transfer, I’ll endorse your request.”
“Thank you, Sergeant Grayson,” she says, the relief obvious in her face.
“I won’t give you the old saw about being careful what you wish for,” I say. “But I bet you a bottle of real bourbon that one day you’ll look back at this and want to kick your younger self square in the ass.”
She laughs brightly. Her teeth are white and even, the telltale sign of a middle-class ’burber upbringing.
“And call me Andrew. Basic flight is done. You’re no longer my subordinate. At least not until they shoot your request down, and you get to be senior drill instructor under me for the next batch.”
“Okay,” she says. “Andrew. Can I buy you another drink? Now it’s no longer sucking up to a superior, right?”
I check the battered chrono on my wrist.
“One more can’t hurt things, I suppose. We don’t have to tuck the little nuggets in tonight, after all.”
Someone in the room increases the volume of the large Networks screen mounted on the far wall. I’ve not paid any attention to the news screen at all since I walked into the NCO club, but now I turn around, because the first words from the speakers are “Mars” and “survivors.” Sergeant Lear turns that direction as well.
“Corps Command verified this evening that contact has been established with the largest group of survivors yet located on Mars. The group of holdouts is sheltered in a military bunker underneath Speicher Air/Space Base on the Chryse Planitia plain,” the news announcer says. I look around in the room and see that every pair of eyes is fixed to the news screen now.
“Identities of the 1,453 survivors at the shelter have been transmitted and listed on the Corps Command and Department of Colonial Affairs network nodes,” the announcer continues. “The survivors include almost five hundred military personnel and their families. The new group of holdouts reports that their supply situation is critical, and that they will require resupply or evacuation within the month, or the shelter’s inhabitants will starve to death.”
All over the room, people reach for their PDPs to check the mentioned network nodes. Mars is—was—our biggest colony, and almost everyone in the Corps had relatives or friends on Mars or knows someone who does. I do not, and Sergeant Lear doesn’t seem to, either, because she continues drinking her beer and leaves her PDP in her pocket.
“Within the month,” she says. “No pressure or anything, right?”
I walk into my room a few hours later with considerably more than just one extra beer in me. I close the door behind me and toss the beret onto the bed. Then I sit down at the wall-mounted folding desk next to my bunk, where the screen of my terminal is blinking with an UNREAD MESSAGES notification.
>Got off duty three hours early. You weren’t on the last shuttle. What gives?—H.
I start typing a response, but decide that my patience level with my prosthetic fingers isn’t high enough. I open the drawer of my desk and pull out two small pill containers. One holds the pain meds they’ve started prescribing after the hand surgery, when I started having aches in the intact part of the damaged hand. The other pills are heavy-duty sleep aids, to make sure I can go through at least half the night without horrendous dreams. I take a pill out of each container, walk over to the sink, and wash both down with a swig of water. Then I return to the terminal and tap on the comms link that will connect me to Halley via vid chat. The screen says BANDWIDTH ALLOCATION REQUESTED for about ten seconds before changing to ALLOCATION GRANTED—CONNECTING.
“You look like crap,” Halley says when she sees my face.
“Love you too, dear,” I say. �
�Come and teach the nuggets down here which end of the gun is dangerous, and let’s see how you look after three months.”
“Like I don’t have any experience in that field,” she says. “I thought you’d be on the last bird up. Don’t tell me they’ve postponed graduation.”
“No, the nuggets are all on their way home,” I reply. “I just had a few drinks with one of my drill sergeants. She wanted me to sign off on a transfer order. Wants to go back to regular Fleet duty, if you can believe that. When I got to Flight Ops, they had cancelled the 1900 run to Luna because they have three shuttles down right now.”
Halley rolls her eyes slightly and shakes her head. She has the same short, helmet-friendly haircut she’s worn since she got into Combat Flight School over half a decade ago, and I have a hard time imagining her with any other cut now.
“Send her up, and I can change her mind in about thirty seconds. So when are you coming up? And what are you going to do to make up for the fact that I’m going to be sleeping by myself in our first night off together in four stinking weeks?”
“Sorry about that,” I say. “I’ll bring some Scotch. Real, not the synthetic shit.”
Halley purses her lips as if in thought and then nods after a moment.
“That would be acceptable restitution. You better make that first shuttle up to Luna in the morning. Remember, we have that thing at noon before we can go down to Vermont.”
“Right,” I say. “Almost forgot. Where are they holding it?”
“The flight deck on Regulus. They’re going to park her in geosynchronous orbit over the capital.”
“How symbolic. I’ll be there, don’t worry.”
“It’ll cost you a lot more than some Scotch if you make me do this alone, Andrew. Fair warning.”
“Acknowledged,” I reply.
“I’ll see you in the morning,” Halley says. “I’ll go to sleep now. Alone. Most boring.”
“Sorry again. I’ll make it up to you tomorrow. Love you.”
“You too,” she says. Then she pretends to stick a finger down her throat and makes a little retching sound. “Have a good night, love.”
She air-kisses the vid lens before signing off, and I have a sudden and almost overwhelming urge to be up there and run my fingers through her hair. I lied to Sergeant Lear earlier—I am bored shitless with boot camp instructor duty, too, but I love being posted on Earth because it lets me stay close to my wife. I feel a little selfish for being content with this job just because I get to spend leaves and weekends with Halley, but after all that has happened in the last few years, I think we have damn well earned the privilege.
CHAPTER 4
“God, I hate this monkey suit.”
“Shut up and clasp your collar,” Halley says. “You can look soldierly once or twice a year at least.”
“It won’t lock. Fucking fastener always takes me twenty tries to get together.”
Halley steps behind me and moves my hands aside with hers. Then she clasps both halves of my Fleet dress uniform’s stand-up collar with a swift and practiced motion.
“There,” she says.
“I hardly ever wear this thing,” I say, and check myself in the mirror. Gig line straight, belt buckle polished and perfectly centered, medal rack lined up neatly, combat drop badge shiny. I step aside to let Halley use the mirror. She is wearing the same uniform, the Fleet’s Class A dress smock that usually collects dust in a combat trooper’s locker until there’s a wedding or a formal funeral. My medal rack is topped with a combat drop badge, senior level. Halley’s medal rack sports combat aviator wings on top. The new Fleet command saw fit to throw a handful of medals at us after the Battle of Earth almost a year ago. We both have a Silver Star, but Halley’s collection of tin-on-a-ribbon is noticeably bigger than mine: Silver Star, Distinguished Flying Cross (three awards), Purple Heart, and half a dozen other Fleet awards for bravery and professionalism and not skipping ahead in the chow line. The longer I’m in the military, the less those colorful ribbons mean to me. Considering what I have to trade every time they give me a new one, those ribbons are piss-poor compensation.
Halley tugs on the bottom of her tunic to smooth it out. Then she flicks a bit of lint from the epaulette on her shoulder, where the three stars of her rank gleam in the light from the bathroom LED fixtures.
“Looking sharp, Captain,” I say. “Maybe you ought to represent the both of us. You’re senior in rank.”
“You are not getting out of this one,” she says. “You were a lot closer to him than I was.”
“You know he wouldn’t give a shit about that medal,” I say. “And he sure as hell wouldn’t care if we showed up for that dog-and-pony show.”
“No, he wouldn’t. But the Fleet does. His family does. And I am not going to stand at attention in my dress blues by myself. So get your cover and let’s go, Sergeant First Class Grayson. The shuttle is waiting.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I walk over to the kitchen table, snatch up my scarlet combat controller beret, roll it up, and tuck it underneath my left epaulette. We’ve been married almost a year, and by now I know better than to argue with my superior.
The shuttle is full to the last seat. The passengers are roughly half uniformed Fleet or SI, half civilian techs. We are running training cycles at double the rate of the pre-Exodus days, and the fleet yards above Luna are as busy as they have ever been. We lost so many trained soldiers and sailors last year that we are just now beginning to make a dent in the rebuilding of the Fleet. We are building and retrofitting ships, retraining troops, and fortifying Earth around the clock, and we still aren’t halfway back to the forces we had before the Lankies took out half the Fleet and the old government absconded with most of the rest.
But there are bright spots in our new line of battle.
“Will you look at that huge son of a bitch,” Halley says. She leans across my lap to get a better view of the ships cruising slowly in formation a few thousand meters off the shuttle’s starboard side. Her hair smells like the slightly antiseptic three-in-one military shampoo.
“That’s a lot of tonnage,” I concur.
Off our starboard, the Fleet’s latest commissioned warship is escorted by two frigates, which look like divers swimming alongside a whale shark. The NACS Agincourt is just slightly under a thousand meters long, half again the length and tonnage of a supercarrier. I don’t know much about warship design, but I know people who do, and they told me that the Agincourt is basically a really big particle cannon strapped to a bunch of fusion reactors and wrapped in the latest armor. One of Earth’s two new battleships, built in secrecy by the same government that fled the Solar System with the Fleet’s best gear and a few ten thousand of the NAC’s elite. She wasn’t complete when the Lankies forced our hand a year ago, so the Exodus fleet left her and her sister ship behind. In the interest of power balance, we gave the other one to the SRA, where it is about to be commissioned as the Arkhangelsk.
“Look,” Halley says, and points at the aft hull of the Agincourt. “They’re still not done. There’s no armor plating on the port-side ass end.”
“Ran out of alloy, maybe?” I offer. “As long as the guns and propulsion work.”
“Tell you what. If we ever built a ship that looks like it may scare a Lanky, this one’s it,” Halley says. “It looks mean as hell.”
I look out of the shuttle’s scuffed multilayered polyplast window and find myself nodding in silent agreement. The Agincourt doesn’t share the roughly cylindrical fat torpedo shape of the other warships in the Fleet. She’s squat and blocky, with a massive dorsal ridge of armor plates that runs the length of the ship from bow to stern. If the Lankies look a bit like prehistoric dinosaurs, this ship looks like a gigantic approximation of a snapping turtle, flattened and stretched to a kilometer in length. There are no rail guns or sensor arrays cluttering that uninterrupted ride of armor protection. This ship looks like it was built to get close to dangerous things and blow them to piec
es.
“Humanity’s last, best hope,” I say, with dramatic pathos.
“She may just be,” Halley replies. “Oh, by the way—I heard through the Fleet rumor network that our SRA pals are commissioning the other one this month.”
“Good. The more guns pointed toward the Mars approach, the better.”
“They’re already calling ours the ‘Aggie’ in the Fleet. The other one is ‘Archie.’”
“Aggie and Archie,” I repeat. “Our ticket back to Mars, or a super-expensive way to turn half a million tons of steel and alloy into scrap.”
“Always the optimist, huh?”
“Six years of this shit, I’m biased toward ‘cynical realism.’”
“It’s them or nothing,” Halley says. “There’s not much left in the construction queue, and those renegade fuckers took everything else worth a shit to God knows where when they left us behind.”
“Hope they run into a whole fleet of Lankies and get blown to shit in cold, dark space, fifty light-years from home.”
“Better hope we find them before the Lankies do. We need all those ships back. They can have the people. Saves us the trouble of having to kill them ourselves.”
Luna is as busy as I’ve ever seen it, although you wouldn’t be able to tell just by looking at the surface. Because it’s close to Earth and has low gravity and no atmosphere, the moon is the ideal off-world training ground for all space combat occupational specialties, and both NAC and SRA have their main military schools here. This is where we train our future drop ship pilots and Spaceborne Infantry, and about two dozen other military jobs. I thought the thrill of seeing Earth from the moon would never get old, but I’ve spent a lot of time here since the Battle of Earth last year, and I find myself conceding that I may have been wrong. But training duty has meant getting to spend time with Halley, and that won’t ever get old. Even the normally boring three-hour shuttle ride from Luna to Earth orbit is a welcome respite with my wife by my side. We have spent more time together in the past eleven months than in the five years we had been together before then, and we aren’t sick of each other yet, which I suppose is a good sign.