Chains of Command

by Marko Kloos

  “Copy that,” she replies. Then she shakes her head and grins. “Still not used to you calling the shots and telling me what to do.”

  “Tell me about it,” I say.

  CHAPTER 18

  It feels good to be gearing up for a concrete mission again after days and days of uncertainty and tension. With my battle armor and my weapon, I have a tiny bit of control over my existence again out here in the black. First and Second Squads are ready and waiting in precise lines on both sides of the passageway outside when I leave the platoon pod. Portsmouth has very wide passageways because of the freight and supplies that need to be moved from pod to pod in the ship, and even two full infantry squads in combat gear don’t clog it up.

  “What in the fuck is that?” one of the troopers says in astonishment when we walk into the aviation pod, where the Blackfly drop ship squats on the deck with her engines silent, warning strobe at the rear of the tail boom painting the inside of the pod with bright orange streaks.

  “That’s the state of the art in battlefield transportation, Giddings,” Philbrick answers. “So secret, it doesn’t even exist.”

  “Sure as shit looks real to me,” Corporal Giddings says, his eyes firmly glued to the exotic and unfamiliar shape of the Blackfly.

  The tail ramp of the Blackfly is much narrower than the ones on the Dragonflies and Wasps, despite the fact that the ship is quite a bit larger than either. As with the ship, there are no straight lines and right angles on the ramp, either. Its edges have a sort of serrated look to them, facets with round corners, and the ramp is slightly narrower at the bottom than it is at the top. It’s coated with some absorbent material that muffles our steps as we trudge up the ramp, which feels all wrong. I like the reassuring clatter of boot soles on steel whenever I board a drop ship with a platoon, and its absence is an unwelcome change in pre-battle ritual.

  As big as the Blackfly is on the outside, the hold seems smaller than the one on the Dragonfly. Where the other drop ships have two rows of seats on each side with the troopers facing each other across the hold, this ship also has two rows on the centerline of the ship, seats that are arranged back-to-back so the troopers sitting in them face the outside rows.

  “First Squad, center left,” the crew chief of the drop ship directs. “Second Squad, center right.”

  The squads file into the unfamiliar ship as instructed, one squad per row. Platoon leaders usually have a seat up near the front bulkhead, and I look for my assigned spot. The crew chief points me toward it.

  “Command console,” he says. “Data jack is by your right knee when you sit down.”

  The command console in the Blackfly makes the ones in the older drop ships look like rows of cans on strings. I have no fewer than four large display panels in front of me, with several smaller ones arranged in a row overhead. I can command the whole platoon with the comms suite in my suit, of course, but it’s much easier to keep an eye on the big picture when you have hardwired twenty-inch display flats instead of simulated ones projected into your field of vision by your helmet. I strap myself into the seat in front of the console, connect the data umbilical from the console’s jack into the receptacle on my armor, and let my tactical computer connect to the ship’s much more powerful neural network. I’m facing the port side of the hull, so the rows of squad jump seats are to my left. Behind me, the crew chief sits down at his own control console on the other side of the drop ship’s aisle.

  “Ramp up,” he announces. The Blackfly’s tail ramp creeps upward into the closed position with a soft hydraulic hiss and seals itself into place.

  “Passengers aboard, verify hard seal on the cargo hold,” the crew chief sends to the flight deck. My heart skips a beat as I anticipate the reply from the flight deck, hoping to hear Halley, but the voice that replies is male and unfamiliar.

  “Copy hard seal on cargo hold,” the pilot sends back. “Stand by for undocking. Turning one and two.”

  The ship’s engines spring to life with a sort of whooshing roar, which is barely a whisper here in the cargo compartment. I can feel the hull vibrating slightly as both of the drop ship’s main propulsion units come online.

  “Holy shit, this thing is quiet?” I say to the crew chief, who nods with a grin.

  “Quieter at full throttle than a Wasp at idle,” he says. “She has noise-absorbing mounts on her noise-absorbing mounts.”

  I return his grin and turn around to check my network link.

  “Rogue Ops, Rogue Actual. Comms and data link check.”

  “Rogue Actual, Rogue Ops. You are five by five on voice and data.”

  I toggle into my platoon’s network and select the squad leader channels.

  “Rogue squads, Rogue Actual. Give me a comms and TacLink check,” I say.

  “Rogue One Actual, check,” Gunnery Sergeant Philbrick sends back his verification.

  “Rogue Two Actual, check,” Sergeant Wilsey replies.

  Twenty-six individual trooper names pop up on my display in two rows of blue lettering, two squads with three fire teams of four troopers each, along with both my squad leaders. We’re only going in with one of those squads, but it still seems like overkill to send thirteen fully geared SI troopers in to take over one little relay station. On the other hand, things in this line of business have a habit of going to shit on the ground once the mission starts, and there has never been a platoon leader in battle who thought he had way too many troops on hand to deal with a problem.

  “Rogue Ops, Rogue Actual. Comms cross-check complete,” I send back to ops. “Ready for showtime.”

  Outside in the aviation pod, I hear the faint blaring of a warning klaxon.

  “All personnel, clear the pod for flight ops,” the overhead announcement comes. “Depressurizing pod in t-minus thirty. I repeat, all personnel clear the pod for flight ops. Depressurizing in t-minus twenty-six.”

  The modular flight pod is a big compromise solution. It doesn’t have the standard docking clamp arrangement of a proper flight deck, and there’s no double airlock to enable a drop ship to launch out of the bottom hull without depressurizing the hangar. Instead, there’s a docking clamp overhead that’s attached to a rail mounted to the ceiling of the pod. As we wait for the depressurization to start, the clamp extends from the rail and attaches to the receptacles on the top of the hull. Then the clamp pulls the drop ship off the deck a very short distance.

  “Depressurization in ten. Nine. Eight. Seven . . .”

  The aviation pod doesn’t depressurize gently and slowly like an EVA airlock. Instead, orange warning strobes flash, and then the entire outward section of the pod opens out and into space, the outer hull panels unsealing like a huge clamshell. The drop ship rocks slightly in its clamp as all the air in the pod escapes into space at once. The pod doors swing out of the way, and the boom above the drop ship extends into the space beyond. I watch on the camera feed as the boom folds out to twice its original length and then comes to a stop.

  “Launch prep complete,” the pilot announces. “Portsmouth Ops, Blackfly One requesting permission to launch.”

  “Blackfly One, Portsmouth Ops. You are cleared to launch off Starboard Pod One. Initiate launch sequence and maintain heading of relative nine-zero by zero-zero after launch.”

  “Portsmouth Ops, copy initiate launch and assume relative nine-zero by zero-zero. Initiating launch sequence.”

  The docking clamp puts itself into motion and moves the Blackfly out of the aviation pod and into the open space beyond the clamshell pod doors. The ship takes up most of the space inside the pod, so our ride on the launch rail doesn’t take very long. Then we come to a gentle stop at the end of the rail. I check the camera feed and see the hull of Portsmouth disconcertingly close to the end of the Blackfly’s tail boom.

  “Drop in three, two, one. Drop.”

  I’m used to drop ships falling away from their launching hosts as the launch airlock is normally still inside the artificial gravity field of the bigger ship, but the
Blackfly gently releases from the clamp and slowly floats away from Portsmouth as the pilot throttles up the engines very slightly. When we are several dozen meters from the launch boom, he increases thrust, and we accelerate away from Portsmouth. The ship is astonishingly quiet, as if someone had wrapped the engines in the world’s biggest blanket.

  “Launch sequence complete,” the pilot sends to Portsmouth. “We are go for mission profile burn.”

  “Blackfly One, resume own navigation and enter mission profile trajectory at your discretion,” Portsmouth Control sends back. “Good luck, and Godspeed.”

  I look back toward Portsmouth on the camera feed, and I realize with some discomfort that I’ve never left a host ship via drop ship while my wife was still on board. Every time we were on the same Fleet vessel together and left it on a drop ship, she was in the pilot seat of that ship.

  On the other side of Portsmouth, Berlin is keeping station several kilometers away. The pilot puts the Blackfly into a wide turn to port, and we accelerate ahead of Portsmouth and then cross in front of her bow. The rough black paint is working well—with all the position lights and hull illumination turned off, she’s pretty hard to spot against the backdrop of deep space with the naked eye even from just a kilometer or two away.

  “Burning for intercept trajectory,” the pilot announces. Then he throttles up all the way, and the drop ship practically leaps away from our two-ship task force. I take another look back when we are several hundred kilometers downrange, and even the big Portsmouth with all her size and amenities looks almost insignificantly tiny in the black void behind us.

  The transit to the target asteroid takes four hours, which is a long time when you are wearing battle armor and you’re strapped into a spartan jump seat that wasn’t built for long-term comfort. The pilot seems to know what he’s doing—every time the asteroid is at the point of its rotation where the relay station is on the side away from us, he burns the engines to accelerate us or make trajectory corrections, and whenever the station faces us, we are coasting, like a black hole in space. Seeing a ship in polychromatic camouflage from the vantage point of its hull-mounted lenses is the weirdest visual. I can tell roughly where the outlines of the ship are, but the Blackfly itself is undefined and blurry, as if it’s partially translucent. I’ve seen the effect before on a smaller scale, while wearing my bug suit on Lanky-controlled worlds, but to see it on this scale is both amazing and a little disconcerting.

  On our approach, I spend my time collating camera visuals from the relay station. Every time the asteroid turns the station toward us and we cut out the propulsion, we are a little bit closer and the camera images get a little bit sharper. I share the images with my two squad leaders, Gunny Philbrick and Staff Sergeant Wilsey, to come up with a plan of attack on the fly.

  “Central section looks maybe twenty-five meters across,” Philbrick says. “Ain’t much of a habitat. If it’s manned, they have a half dozen guys there.”

  “Civil or military, you think?”

  “What would you put there?”

  “If it’s a listening post, military. If it’s a comms relay, civvie techs,” I say.

  “No need to stash a full squad away on that,” Philbrick says. “They’re not there to fight, just to rotate watch shifts. Four to six, tops. Infrastructure won’t support more.”

  “Worst-case scenario, we have a reinforced fire team in there. Plus side, they don’t know we’re coming. We coast up and do a stealthy insert, we catch half of them asleep or on the shitter.”

  “Even if not, we’ll be ready for trouble and they won’t be,” Philbrick says. “Whatever they’re watching for, it ain’t gonna be us.”

  I look over the pictures of the relay station again and mark the visible airlocks for my squad leaders.

  “That hatch right there on the main would be ideal,” I say. “Gets us in right next to the reactor, and I bet their command consoles are right near there.”

  “Yeah, but it’d be a bitch to coast this thing in next to the hub,” Wilsey says. “There’s not a ton of clearance between the spokes right in that spot.”

  “Then we go in on that end over there,” Philbrick suggests, and marks a secondary hatch on one of the outer pods at the end of a station spoke. “Jack the hatch or blow it open. That looks like a fifty-meter dash to the central module once we have the airlock open.”

  “I wish we could send Second Squad around to pop into the hatch on the other side at the same time, but we only have one bird and one docking collar.” I circle the hatch Philbrick suggested. “That’ll have to be the one. Get First Squad briefed and ready to be on the bounce.”

  “Copy that, LT,” he replies, and it takes me half a second to process that he means me.

  The target asteroid is large, maybe a kilometer from one end of its vaguely football-shaped bulk to the other. Our drop ship pilot matches course and rotation with the asteroid as we approach, still on the far side from the relay station, and begins his approach to the target.

  “At the apex of the next rotation, we’re moving in right above the deck,” the pilot says to me over our local tactical channel. “That gives you nineteen minutes before the station rotates back toward the system interior and they start sending again.”

  “Copy that,” I reply before relaying the information to my squad leaders. With the ship under full EMCON, we are on our own right now, and I have to make all the tactical decisions without being able to consult with Major Masoud or anyone else in our task force, which is standing by four hours away.

  “Station over the apex in thirty seconds. ETA two minutes.”

  “First Squad, lock and load,” I order. “Form up for entry in the EVA lock.”

  Gunny Philbrick and his squad unbuckle and get out of their seats to move up past me and into the EVA lock that’s between the bulkhead to my right and the cockpit section. Like the Dragonfly class, the Blackfly has a separate airlock system for its two exterior access hatches in the flanks of the ship, to enable personnel launch or retrieval in zero-atmosphere environments without having to open the tail ramp and decompress the entire cargo hold.

  I swivel around in my chair and check the squad as they file by. Sergeant Humphrey gives me a jaunty little thumbs-up. Gunny Philbrick brings up the rear, and we exchange nods.

  “Careful out there, Gunny,” I say as he walks by.

  “Always,” he replies, and pats the hard plastic of his M-66 carbine.

  We approach the station right above the deck, so low that I can make out the texture of the asteroid’s surface in sharp detail on the camera feed. The pilot weaves the Blackfly through the little crags and nooks formed by the asteroid’s irregular surface, and his deft hand on the stick reminds me of Halley’s flying skills.

  “Two hundred fifty meters,” he sends. “Eighteen minutes until the next rotation apex. Two hundred meters. One hundred fifty meters.”

  We coast into position next to one of the station’s outlying pods. The station itself is a modular construction, pods and access tubes anchored to the asteroid’s rock surface with heavy bolts. Our pilot expertly slows down the drop ship and then brings us exactly parallel to the target pod’s external airlock hatch. I don’t know how fast this asteroid is moving through space or at what rate it is spinning around its own axis, but the pilot of our ship has matched the velocity and rotation rate perfectly with a seventy-ton drop ship on the first try.

  “Extending docking collar.”

  With the drop ship’s starboard hatch right next to the airlock of the station, the pilot extends the flexible docking collar from the hull of the Blackfly to the exterior wall of the station pod. There are many ways for SI troopers to enter an enemy space installation, and this one is the fastest and most preferred way—making a hard link between the assault ship and the target to be boarded, and then just cutting open the hatch or hacking it open electronically.

  The collar attaches itself to the hull around the airlock soundlessly.

  “
Collar extended and latched on,” the pilot sends. “Stand by for pressurization.”

  There’s now a flexible black umbilical connecting the drop ship’s starboard hatch to the airlock of the station pod, just big enough for a squad to rush through in single file. I know that Philbrick and his squad will still have their helmet visors down and their suits’ oxygen supply switched on, because any incoming fire or emergency maneuvering will tear the docking collar from the hull or depressurize it.

  “Pressurization complete. You are ‘go’ for main hatch release and EVA.”

  “Copy clear for hatch release and EVA,” Gunny Philbrick replies.

  As First Squad gathers behind their leader and prepares to exit the ship and assault the station, I bring up all their visual feeds on my command console, then arrange the feed windows to make a row slightly above my field of vision. With the command feed, I can see what the squad sees and monitor everything from my jump seat without even turning my head, and I can selectively talk to the squad as a whole, the fire team leaders, or each individual trooper. It’s a lot like my regular job as a combat controller, only now I’m directing people with rifles rather than air assets or artillery batteries.

  “Pressurization confirmed. Opening main hatch.” Sergeant Humphrey wrestles the lever for the hatch control downward, and the hatch moves out and away with a soft hiss.

  The squad moves out in single file, Sergeant Humphrey in the lead. There’s air in the docking collar, but no gravity, so they all use the hand- and footholds set into the side of the collar at regular intervals to move with practiced swiftness through the zero-gravity tunnel formed by the collar. While she’s using her left hand to grab the assist loops and pull herself forward, Sergeant Humphrey’s right hand holds her fléchette carbine, and the green dot from her targeting laser never wanders off the outer airlock door of the station.

  “Hack it,” Gunny Philbrick tells her. “Thirty seconds. Then we’ll go in the hard way.”