Chains of Command

by Marko Kloos

  “There’s Gateway,” Halley says, and points at the main NAC military space hub as we coast into Earth orbit a while later.

  We pass within ten kilometers of the station, close enough to see that almost half the docking berths are occupied by warships. Most of those ships are on the small side—frigates, corvettes, a few destroyers, a light cruiser—but it looks significantly busier than it did a year ago, when both Gateway and Independence stations were all but deserted. Most of the ships anchored over there are recommissioned relics from the mothball fleet, but they are armored hulls with missile tubes and working Alcubierre drives, and we need all of those we can get these days.

  “Prepare for arrival,” an announcement from the flight deck chimes in. “Docking at Regulus in one-zero minutes.”

  “Party time,” Halley says. She looks over the ribbon rack and pilot wings on her dress tunic to make sure she didn’t miss a piece of lint or a loose thread.

  “Some party,” I grumble, but do likewise. I don’t want to be here, but I need to be. If anyone deserves the honor, it’s the man receiving our highest military award today—posthumously.

  The enormous flight deck of the Regulus has been neatened up for the ceremony. There’s a small podium near the forward hangar bulkhead right underneath the large painted ship’s seal. Someone set up flagpoles with the flags of the NAC and the Fleet, and there are about a hundred chairs in front of the podium, most of them occupied by a mix of uniformed Fleet personnel and people in civilian clothing.

  “Camera crews.” Halley points.

  Over by the podium, there’s a small forest of camera tripods set up, far more than the typical single Fleet newsie recording motivational footage at the average medal ceremony. This is the big one, the one everyone just calls “the Medal,” and the fact that the president of the NAC awards it means a far bigger PR circus than usual. Lots of people like to be close to glory. Maybe they hope the shine will rub off somehow. There are probably twice as many people as chairs in this part of the hangar deck.

  “Over there,” I say, and nod over to a group of soldiers standing a little away from the main gaggle of chatting civilians. In mixed gatherings, combat grunts tend to cluster together, strength and comfort in numbers, just like on the battlefield.

  We cross the space between the shuttle’s parking spot and the area by the podium. The group of soldiers I spotted has many familiar faces in it. There’s almost the entire former command crew of the Indianapolis, and some of the Spaceborne Infantry grunts from her old SI detachment. One of them, a tall and lean SI gunnery sergeant, lifts a hand in greeting as we walk up to the group.

  “Grayson,” he says. “Good to see you.”

  “Gunnery Sergeant Philbrick,” I say, with emphasis on the first word. “Who the hell promoted you?”

  “They put promotions onto the trays at chow these days.” He shrugs with a smile. “Lots of billets open all over the place. You got bumped too, I see.”

  I glance at my shoulder boards, which have the rank insignia of a sergeant first class, the Fleet version of the same rank Philbrick is wearing.

  “Same deal,” I say. “Lots of slots, few bodies to fill ’em.”

  Philbrick turns to Halley.

  “Good morning, Captain.”

  She waves him off as he raises his hand for a salute.

  “At ease. With all the brass on this flight deck, you’ll dislocate your arm if you want to be all proper.”

  “My wife,” I say. “Halley, this is Gunny Philbrick. He was on Indy with me last year. Everyone else, too.” I point to the troopers with Philbrick, who by now have formed a semicircle around us.

  “I heard,” Halley says. She extends a hand to Gunny Philbrick.

  “Thanks for busting this dope out of the brig for me. Would have been a lonely wedding without him there.”

  “I bet.” Philbrick shakes Halley’s hand with a grin. “My pleasure, Captain.”

  “Where’s Major Renner?” I ask.

  “Lieutenant Colonel Renner,” Philbrick corrects me. He nods over to the podium. “First row. She got a ringside seat.”

  Then-Major Renner was the Indy’s executive officer when I spent several weeks aboard last year for our scouting run back to the Solar System. Apparently, when Colonel Campbell gave the order to get into the escape pods, she almost had a physical fight with the skipper in an attempt to stay on board. Almost everyone on Indy survived except for five people—Colonel Campbell, the two volunteers who stayed behind with him to man the helm and navigation stations, and two enlisted sailors whose escape pods were never found when the Fleet backtracked on Indy’s trajectory and rescued the survivors.

  “How’s the hand?” Philbrick asks.

  I hold up my left hand and wiggle my fingers.

  “Looks like a hand again,” he says.

  “Four days of misery at Great Lakes. Took them three tries to match the skin tone. It’s mostly for cosmetics. Waited too long to get the nerve ends fused back together.”

  “That sucks.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Could have been worse, though.” I look over to the podium, where someone has set up a large printout of Colonel Campbell’s personnel file picture. There’s a black ribbon tied across one corner.

  “Could have been,” Philbrick agrees.

  There’s a minor commotion near the forward hangar bulkhead. We turn to see a group of people entering the hangar through the main access hatch. One of them is a short, slender, white-haired woman in her sixties. I recognize her from the footage of her inauguration ceremony a few months ago.

  “That’s the president,” I say to Halley, who just nods.

  “No shit,” she says. “She looks shorter in person, doesn’t she?”

  “Word has it she was a Shrike jock,” Philbrick says. “Retired commander.”

  I’ve seen the old president—the bastard who left Earth a year back with most of his cabinet and all the good combat hardware left in the Fleet—in Network news broadcasts plenty of times. He always had a phalanx of bodyguards around him whenever he showed up in public. This new president has two guys in civvie suits by her side, but they’re too soft-looking for bodyguards. There are also a few uniformed Fleet officers with her, but they’re all in dress blues, not combat gear, and clearly just guides. It seems that the new commander-in-chief has no anxieties about mingling with common troops without armed protection. Come to think of it, there are no security checkpoints in sight anywhere on the flight deck. I see lots of holstered sidearms, and the Fleet MPs by the forward bulkhead have their usual PDWs slung across their chests, but the president and her entourage don’t seem to care. Most of the new government is made up of veterans, and there’s definitely a new wind blowing in NAC state/citizen relations.

  “Ten-hut!” one of the general officers near the podium bellows into the audio pickup, and we all snap to attention wherever we’re standing.

  We watch the president walk up to the podium. The handful of generals by the podium salute her, and she replies with a practiced salute of her own. The president looks a bit tired, but her voice is steady and clear when she addresses the assembly on the hangar deck.

  “At ease,” the president says. We all relax out of our ramrod-straight attention postures.

  “I’m still not used to this,” she says. “Flag officers saluting me, I mean. When I was in the service, seeing this many general officers looking at me expectantly usually meant I was in some deep shit.”

  There’s chuckling and some outright laughter in the ranks, and the president smiles curtly. Then her face turns serious again.

  “I’d love to tell you that this is my favorite part of the new job, but it isn’t. Not by a long shot.”

  She looks over at the picture of Colonel Campbell, regarding the crowd with that same wryly amused, slightly detached expression I knew well.

  “More than half the time, this medal is awarded posthumously,” she continues. “As it is today. That means that every other of th
ese awards ceremonies, we have lost someone we could not afford to lose. And there’s no doubt that we are all diminished for not having Colonel Campbell among our ranks anymore.”

  She looks at the data pad on the podium in front of her. Then she picks it up and holds it for everyone to see.

  “This is Colonel Campbell’s official Medal of Honor citation. I could read it to you word for word, all seven paragraphs of it, but you all know what he did. When we stood with our backs against the wall, when the Lanky seed ship was bearing down to destroy what was left of our Fleet in orbit, he sacrificed himself and his ship to buy us time. We are all still here, putting the pieces back together, because he decided that his life and his ship were a fair trade for the lives of everyone else. That is a debt that we cannot even begin to repay, certainly not with a piece of lacquered gold on a ribbon. But it’s a start.”

  She puts the data pad down again and pauses for a moment.

  “Colonel Campbell was supposed to scout out the secret renegade anchorage and retrieve his recon buoys. When he got word that there was a Lanky seed ship headed for Earth and less than three hours away, he made a different call. He set Indianapolis on a parabolic back to Earth, and then he burned all his reactor fuel to drive his ship as fast as he could. He had the crew take to the escape pods, and then he flew his ship into the approaching Lanky at close to one-thirtieth of light speed.”

  Every time I play out the scenario in my head, I wonder what those last few moments in Indy’s CIC must have been like. What was going through the colonel’s head, knowing he’d blink out of existence in just a few seconds, never knowing whether his actions had made a difference in the end? I’m sure the colonel and the two others in CIC died in a microsecond when Indy disintegrated against the Lanky’s hull, and that’s not a horrible way to go, but the knowledge of their imminent deaths must have been dreadful.

  “Colonel Campbell wasn’t the only one to die that day,” the president continues. “Not by a long shot. We lost so many in that battle last year. Too many. But he did what he did to give us a fighting chance. All of us, here on this planet, whatever nationality or alliance. And for that, a bucket of these medals wouldn’t be adequate recognition. But like I said—it’s a start.”

  The rest of the ceremony is mercifully brief. The president does read out the citation for Colonel Campbell’s Medal of Honor, because that’s what you do at events like this. Then a Fleet major steps up next to her with the medal in a shadow box made of black lacquered wood. To a living recipient, she would present the award by hanging it around his or her neck, but the posthumous awards are given to the closest relative, mounted in a box because only the recipient gets to wear it.

  I don’t know the woman accepting the award from the president, but I’m guessing it’s Colonel Campbell’s wife. She’s tall, with steel-gray hair that sits in tight curls on her head, and her expression is one of stone-faced detachment. I realize that I know next to nothing about Colonel Campbell’s private life. He was the executive officer on Versailles for the brief time I was a member of her crew, and then I didn’t see him again until our mission to New Svalbard last year, just before the Alcubierre network was deactivated and everything went to shit. I spent a few weeks on Indianapolis with him, but I never had the opportunity to talk to him outside of the CIC and our official duties, and now I never will.

  When it’s all over, they play a slow and somber version of the Commonwealth national anthem over the PA system, the president mingles for a little while to talk to Colonel Campbell’s relatives a little more, and the crowd slowly starts to disperse.

  “Well, that was uplifting,” Halley says. “Let’s get back to our quarters and do something fun. We have a day and a half off.”

  “Hang on for a second,” I say. There are more familiar faces in the crowd over by the podium, and one of them looks over to me and waves in recognition.

  “I need to introduce you to someone,” I say, and pull Halley with me.

  “Andrew,” Dmitry says in his broad Russian accent when we meet up in the middle of the hangar deck. He grins and holds out a hand, and I shake it firmly. Dmitry’s grip is much stronger than his short stature would suggest. I know that he can punch much harder than a guy his size ought to be able to hit.

  “Dmitry,” I say. “You’re about the last person I expected to see here today.”

  “Here to award battle honors to commander of fine little imperialist spy ship,” he replies.

  “You’re giving an Alliance award to a Commonwealth officer?”

  “Alliance general staff gives award,” Dmitry says. “I just deliver medal.”

  I turn toward Halley and nod at Dmitry.

  “This is Senior Sergeant Dmitry Chistyakov, Alliance Marines. Dmitry, this is my wife, Captain Halley.”

  Dmitry doesn’t salute Halley, and she makes no motion to extend any military courtesies herself. Instead, they just sort of size each other up for a moment, and then Dmitry extends his hand again.

  “I remember picture. You are pilot.”

  “I am a pilot,” Halley confirms. She takes the offered hand and shakes it curtly. “Pleasure to meet you, Senior Sergeant. I hear you had some misadventures with this knuckle-dragger here last year.”

  “Misadventures,” Dmitry repeats with a slight smile. “Yes, we have many misadventures.”

  Dmitry is wearing the SRA Marines’ dress uniform, which looks completely out of place in a hangar full of military personnel in dark blue Fleet and black-and-blue SI dress uniforms. It’s a gold-trimmed white tunic paired with black trousers, and black boots that are polished to a mirror shine. Underneath the tunic, Dmitry is wearing a collarless shirt that’s horizontally striped in alternating colors of white and blue.

  “You came here just for the medal ceremony?” I ask.

  “Was here already. On moon, on big Commonwealth training facility.” He pronounces the last word very deliberately, as if he has just learned it ten minutes ago. “For observing training of your space infantry. Give advice, take advice, that sort of thing.”

  I’ve known for a while that we have started to exchange personnel and training notes with the Alliance—Halley’s Combat Flight School is hosting two SRA pilots as observers—but I wasn’t aware that Dmitry was one of them.

  “You are in an NAC facility, and you didn’t send me a message?”

  “Has been only three weeks,” Dmitry says. “Busy three weeks. Not much time for personal things.”

  “The world is changing,” Halley says with a wry smile. “It’ll never go back to the way it was. Not now.”

  “Not to old ways,” Dmitry agrees. “But give time. We find new ways to be duraky.” He winks at me and pats my shoulder once.

  “You come see me at imperialist school of infantry, yes? We drink together, maybe see if you are better now at punching. You look like you need exercise. You get squishy around middle.” The word squishy comes out exactly like facility earlier—as if he had just picked it up not too long ago.

  Dmitry winks at Halley and walks back to his own group, a handful of SRA and NAC officers standing in a small gaggle by the podium.

  “That little bastard,” I say.

  “I kind of like him,” Halley says, and pats the front of my tunic.

  CHAPTER 5

  Liberty Falls is only fifteen minutes away from the Homeworld Defense Air Station at Burlington, but getting off the maglev train always feels a bit like stepping into an alternate time and reality. I’ve always felt a bit like a foreign body here, a PRC rat among the upper-middle-class ’burbers, and the feeling is only intensified when Halley and I step out of the maglev terminal in fatigues, with sidearms holstered and our bulky alert bags over our shoulders. The new rules require that we are in uniform and armed while on leave, with a light battle kit in a bag within reach at all times in case there’s a Lanky incursion again while we are away from our duty stations. The alert bags hold lightweight armor sets, helmets, comms kit, and DNA-locked persona
l defense weapons with a thousand rounds of caseless ammunition apiece. If the call comes, we can be minimally battle ready and tied in to TacLink within a minute or two.

  “All the gear makes us look like we’re planning to annex the business district or something,” Halley says when we see the third civvie in as many minutes glancing at us with suppressed discomfort. The armed forces have always been popular in the ’burbs, but even a year after the Lankies visited Earth without invitation, they’re still not used to troops in combat gear openly carrying weapons down here.

  “You’ve seen the cops around here,” I reply. “They don’t even wear hardshell. Two good fire teams could take over Main Street and hold out for three days.”

  Every time I come here, the place looks unreal to me, like a live museum exhibit or a science diorama blown up to life-size scale. Liberty Falls is a neat and clean little town, old-style brick buildings from two hundred years ago mixed in with new architecture, everything painstakingly designed to harmonize and blend the disparate building styles. The trees and bushes everywhere are real, and they must spend a small fortune every year planting actual grass in the little parks scattered all over town. This is an enclave for the well-to-do and the upper middle class, people who can afford living out among real trees where there are still pastures and empty stretches of wilderness. It’s only a hundred kilometers from the Boston-Providence metroplex, but this town might as well be on a colony moon somewhere for all the resemblance it fails to bear to the place where I grew up.

  We walk across the small park in front of the maglev station in the center of town. It’s fringed by real maple trees—raised in a lab, no doubt, but actual living plants. Halley stops in the middle of the park and kneels on the pathway beside the neatly trimmed lawn. Then she runs her hands across the tops of the grass stalks.

  “I know they have that at your parents’ place down in Austin,” I say.