by Marko Kloos
“Major Jackson,” I greet the tall, dark-skinned woman wearing gold oak leaves on her collars. I offer a salute, which she returns before holding out her hand to shake mine.
“Good to see you again,” she says, and startles a little when she sees my shoulder sleeves. “Lieutenant. Moving up on the ladder.”
“Not as high as you, Major.”
“And you thought they were going to arrest you last year,” she says. “Told you they got bigger fish to fry.”
“Precisely why I’m here to talk to the general,” I say.
“Well, jump in and take a seat,” she says. “Just don’t crack any windows on the journey. Some rough neighborhoods on the way, Brigade or not.”
“You’re going to take my gun bag and dog tags for the ride?”
“No need. We’re not hiding out anymore. And you’ll need that buzz gun if we take a wrong turn.”
On the ride into Detroit proper, we pass many scars in the rows of houses and tenement high-rises lining the streets. There are half-gone buildings standing next to occupied ones, and ruins that amount to not much more than charred foundations and twisted steel sticking out of concrete rubble piles. I always thought I’d never go back into this city unless ordered at gunpoint, right until last year when Halley dropped her ship and the platoon in its hold right into the middle of the place in pursuit of a Lanky seedpod. I didn’t have much time to reflect on my fear a great deal then, but I definitely have unwelcome flashbacks as we roll through the summer night.
“Those guys back at the checkpoint were agreeable,” I tell Major Jackson. “Almost courteous.”
“Fleet remnants got a lot of credit last year when you showed up and went right after the Lankies,” Major Jackson says. “SI, too. Defending the civvies, that went over well. You didn’t run like the rest of ’em did.” Her expression darkens. “Deserting the planet. Leaving us to clean the mess.”
“What about HD?”
“We don’t kill each other on sight, if that’s what you mean. But no, HD ain’t precisely very welcome around here on most days. Didn’t hear shit out of Dayton the night the Lankies dropped in. You Fleet and SI people made it all the way from orbit, but they couldn’t be assed to come the hundred fifty klicks from Shughart to help out. If Homeworld Defense don’t defend the home world, the fuck are they good for?”
An hour into our ride, we are right in the middle of Category 5 PRC country, the latest and greatest residence clusters with high-rise towers that are a hundred floors tall. Without a suit computer, I have lost my bearings, so I have no idea where in Detroit I am, and the Cat 5 blocks all look the same wherever you go. Our battle against the Lankies last year took place in the middle of a few Cat 5 blocks. One drop ship, one platoon of troops, half a dozen Lankies, and tens of thousands of frightened civilians. I wouldn’t have bet anything on our survival if someone had told me the odds before the battle, and I’m still amazed that we walked out of there alive. But I take some solace in the fact that throughout our sixty-minute journey, nobody fired a single shot at us as we passed through much of Detroit’s outskirts.
Our ride ends at the foot of a residence cluster. The all-terrain cars descend down a concrete ramp that leads below one of the enormous three-hundred-meter towers that make up each corner of a Category 5 PRC cluster. We pass through a set of steel doors and then into a subterranean passageway wide enough for two cars side by side. Then the space opens up, and we come to a halt in a large underground garage. It’s well lit, and there are at least a dozen more of the old all-terrain vehicles lined up alongside the walls in individually marked bays. More militia troops in olive-drab fatigues are milling around down here, working on cars or loading gear, and a few of them even spare our little column a second look as our driver kills the engine, and we disembark.
“Safe the guns and stow the ammo,” Major Jackson tells her crews. “Come with me, Lieutenant. I’ll take you upstairs.”
“Aye-aye, ma’am,” I reply and follow her dutifully, not keen on drawing attention in this place by stepping a foot away from where I’m expected to be.
“Upstairs” really means upward. We step into an elevator that whisks us to the fiftieth floor of the PRC tower. Then we walk a small gauntlet of checkpoints, all guarded by very fit-looking and heavily armed militia troops that wouldn’t look out of place in an SI ready room. I notice that up here, the troops carry more modern weaponry, current-issue PDWs and M-66 fléchette rifles—stuff that will defeat modern battle armor at close range.
We take another elevator that carries us the rest of the way up the tower to the hundredth floor. There’s a final checkpoint up here, but the armored militiamen step aside and let us through when they see Major Jackson. Nobody has even asked me to surrender the alert bag on my back or the sidearm on my hip. With all the armed personnel around here, I suspect I’d have a really short life expectancy if I pulled out my weapon and started popping off rounds.
Major Jackson leads me into an empty briefing room. There’s a large table with a bunch of mismatched chairs around it, and the major gestures toward it.
“Have a seat, Lieutenant. I’ll let the general know you’re here. Shouldn’t be long.”
“Thank you, Major. Good to see you again.”
“And you.” She exits the room and leaves the door open as she walks out.
The briefing room has tall floor-to-ceiling polyplast windows that look like they’re about five centimeters thick. Outside, the sprawl of the PRCs extends as far as I can see, which isn’t very far despite my vantage point three hundred meters up. There’s a perpetual haze over the large metroplexes that gets illuminated from all the city lights below at night. The incandescent, dirty fog surrounds and envelops the city like an impenetrable dome. From this height, it has a certain beauty to it. I sit down in one of the chairs next to the window, put my alert pack aside, and watch the city outside for a little while. I’ve been in a PRC many times before, but this is the first time as a soldier where I’m by myself, a hundred kilometers or more away from the nearest brothers and sisters in arms. If there’s any trouble tonight, I’ll be on my own, with nobody around to help me or even bite the bullet with me. I look up into the sky, but the glowing haze above the city is dense, and I can’t see the moon, where Halley is probably sleeping in our quarters right now.
A short time later, General Lazarus walks into the room, a data pad in his hand and a tired look on his face. I get out of my chair, but he waves me off curtly before I can salute.
“As you were, Lieutenant. Sit down.”
I do as I am told and put my butt back into the chair. General Lazarus walks over to where I am sitting, pulls out another chair, and sits down in front of me with a small sigh. Then he puts the data pad onto the conference table next to him and stretches his neck.
“Long day,” he says. “They all are, lately.”
“Yes, sir,” I say.
The general looks older than he did last year, more so than the time since our last meeting would justify. His close-cropped hair has quite a bit more gray and silver in it, and there’s deep fatigue evident around his eyes. But he’s still muscular and taut, and he still radiates competence. I don’t know what his name was before he called himself Lazarus, and I never checked the database to ferret out his service record from his Marine days, but I know that his occupational specialty involved breaking people and their stuff. There’s an air of quiet danger around him that tells me he wasn’t a personnel officer or supply group supervisor when he was still wearing a Marine uniform.
“What brings you here tonight? Have you reconsidered my offer from last year? Ready to get out of the Fleet and make a contribution here on the ground?”
“Sticking with the Fleet for now,” I say. “At least until the job is done.”
“It’s never done,” he says. “Even if we get the Lankies out of the Solar System, there’ll always be a new furnace to feed new recruits into. Sooner or later we’ll kill each other again if we have no
Lankies to shoot at anymore.”
“How well are you tied in to Corps intel?” I ask. General Lazarus shakes his head slightly and smiles.
“Let’s just say ‘well enough,’ and leave it at that.”
“Then you know there’s a major operation coming up.”
“You don’t need to have your finger on the pulse of the Intel division to know that. It’s the next logical step. Stop the Lanky incursions, push them back before they figure out to send everything they have at us at once one day. But yes,” he continues, “I have heard about the operation.”
“Three months,” I say. “I just spent two training cycles at Orem to help churn out new bodies for the infantry and the Fleet. I can tell you that we’re nowhere near ready for an op of that size.”
“It’s a gamble,” General Lazarus says. “The eternal generals’ dilemma. Go too soon, risk failure. Wait too long, risk losing initiative to the enemy. I don’t think there has ever been a military campaign planner who was happy with what was on the board when the campaign kicked off.”
“There may be a mission in the works. One that could put more stuff on the board before this whole mess begins. Maybe even enough to influence the outcome.”
“But you can neither confirm nor deny,” General Lazarus says with a tiny smile.
“That’s correct,” I say with an equally measured smile.
“I’m guessing that’s what that new rank is about.” He nods at the stars on my shoulder boards.
“I’m trying to staff a platoon,” I say. “And I’m here because I want to ask your permission to borrow someone under your command. To serve as my right hand for that mission.”
General Lazarus’s right eyebrow takes a slight upward angle for a moment.
“And who did you have in mind?” he asks, even though I’m certain that he knows exactly which one of his troopers I intend to recruit.
“Master Sergeant Fallon,” I say. “No better infantry platoon NCO in the entire Corps. Or what’s left of it.”
General Lazarus chuckles. Then he leans forward, rests his elbows on his knees, and steeples his fingers. He studies me for a moment or two while lightly tapping his chin with his fingertips.
“Master Sergeant Fallon,” he repeats slowly. “Master Sergeant Fallon is one of my most important assets. She is in charge of the NCO development for the Brigade. She trains all my new sergeants. I consider her indispensable at this point.”
“I was hoping I could convince you to let her join me for a few weeks,” I say.
He looks at me and folds his arms in front of his chest, a little smile playing in the corners of his mouth as if he’s trying to decide whether I am joking, or just incredibly brazen.
“And why would I give up one of my senior noncommissioned officers to go on a Fleet mission? What are you putting on the table for me as an incentive? What do I get out of it?”
“If we’re successful, you may never have to worry about fighting Lankies down here again,” I say.
“And if you’re not, I may lose the primary mentor of my noncom corps.” He shakes his head. “I want to see the Lankies gone as much as anyone, but loaning you Master Sergeant Fallon is a lot of certain risk for very uncertain reward. You’re going to have to do better than that.”
“What is it you want?” I ask. “I don’t have any pull with the general staff. I can’t get you any new gear.”
“We have gear,” General Lazarus says. “Lots of it. HD has transferred a lot of the old reserve equipment to us. It’s not the most modern, but it’s sufficient, and it allows us to standardize. No, you’ll have to put something more useful on the table. You know our needs. I discussed them with you last year when I made you the offer to join us.”
I know where he’s going with this, of course. He has me over a barrel, and I know that he knows it by the tiny smile that never leaves the corners of his mouth even as he pretends to be nonplussed.
I let out a small sigh.
“Fine. Fine. You let me borrow Master Sergeant Fallon for this mission, I will take that training slot you offered me. I’ll train your guys for one year, get a program off the ground.”
“Two,” he says.
“Eighteen months,” I say. “A year and a half. And only after we’ve taken care of the immediate threat. After Mars.”
General Lazarus puts the tips of his steepled fingers to his lips again and studies me for a few moments as he ponders my offer.
“Done,” he says.
“Thank you, sir,” I say, trying not to let my profound relief show in my voice.
“Don’t be too thankful just yet,” the general says. “That’s only half the battle. The other half is going to be convincing Master Sergeant Fallon. I can only give her permission to join you. I can’t order her to join you. That sell is all up to you, Lieutenant.”
CHAPTER 13
“This is a sad fucking day for the military,” Sergeant Fallon says when I step out of the elevator and into the tower atrium. She’s waiting in the elevator bank vestibule in immaculate parade rest, hands behind her back, feet spread a shoulder’s width apart. Then she steps forward and gives me a rough and quick hug.
“Been a while, Andrew,” she says.
“That’s a fact,” I say.
“I suppose I should have saluted you instead,” Sergeant Fallon says. “A fucking lieutenant. Of all the NCOs I’ve known, I would have put money on you being the last to accept a commission.”
“You’re exempt,” I say. “And not just because of the blue ribbon.”
As a Medal of Honor recipient, Sergeant Fallon has the prerogative to receive salutes from anyone regardless of rank difference, so she wouldn’t have to salute me anyway. But even without the medal, I would have felt odd about receiving a salute from my old squad leader, a woman who has been in the service since I was in elementary school, and whose combat record makes mine look like I’m a towel-counting supply jockey.
“What are you doing here, Andrew? Thought you had enough of this turf for the rest of your days.”
“I came to see you,” I say. “Got something to ask you.”
“Must be important if you’re all the way out here in Shitville. Is your wife with you, too?”
“No, she’s up at Luna, still training pilots.”
“Well, she did all right last year. Guess they’re learning from someone good.”
The atrium is an enormous square that makes up most of the ground floor of the residence tower. The buildings have a hollow core, for convection cooling and ventilation, and you can see all the way from the atrium floor to the reinforced concrete roof. Tonight, the halves of the roof are open to let the warm summer air circulate. Out on the atrium, people are milling about alone and in small groups, and nobody is paying any particular attention to us.
“I was about to walk over to the interchange to grab a drink and watch the race. Why don’t you come along? We can drink shitty beer and talk a bit.”
“Watch the race?” I ask.
“Yeah. Come, and I’ll show you. It’s what passes for Friday night fun around here now. Beats firefights any night of the week, let me tell you.”
We walk out of the residence tower and into the plaza in the center of the block, which is quite a bit livelier than the atrium. It’s a warm night, and people are out as they usually are when the weather is good. There are vendor stalls lining the sides of the plaza, and the noise level is raucous but not hostile. It feels a lot like the safer parts of my old PRC back home, where you can spend an evening drinking with your friends without having to worry about ending up in a crossfire between gangs or contraband dealers.
“That took a shitload of work,” Sergeant Fallon says when I tell her so. “When we dropped here the night we lost Stratton and Paterson and I lost my leg, this place was a free-fire jungle. People killing each other over rations. Food riots. TA raids. This was the worst of the worst.”
She points to our right, past the next cluster of residence towers
visible beyond the retaining wall of the block we’re in.
“That neighborhood is about five klicks that way, by the way. In case you ever want to do some fucked-up sightseeing.”
“No, thank you,” I reply. I have no interest in seeing the street again where my squad mates died, or the building entrance where we huddled for our last stand and I almost bought the farm after getting shot three times.
“I did, a few months ago,” Sergeant Fallon says.
“Why the fuck would you do that?”
“I don’t know, really. To understand better? To come to terms with it? Fuck, I have no idea. Maybe I wanted to see if there were still bloodstains on the asphalt where that round blew off half my leg.”
“And?”
She shakes her head.
“Nope. Place looks a lot different in daylight. I hardly recognized it. Remember that high-rise you blew up with a thermobaric?”
“Yeah,” I say, and the memory triggers a sudden twisting feeling in my gut.
“It’s still there. Just a little shorter than before. You took out the top ten floors. They just cleared the rubble and put a new roof on.”
“Let’s keep that little detail to ourselves,” I say. “I don’t care to broadcast that around here.”
“It was collateral damage,” Sergeant Fallon says. “You can’t put a gun emplacement on a building and then complain when it gets return fire. None of the Brigade guys would give you shit for what you did. Well, not much.”
“So how did they turn this place around like that?” I ask, eager to move on to a different subject.
“Brigade took over the policing. Recruited from the neighborhoods. Veterans only, at first. Then the locals who weren’t complete shitheads. The trainable ones, not the hard cases from the gangs. Treat ’em right, teach ’em how to do their jobs, crack down on the ones who can’t handle the power. Street by street. Block by block. Work with the hood rats, not against them.”