by Marko Kloos
CHAPTER 26
We get back to First Platoon’s landing zone thirty minutes later. Our run from the Shrikes brought us sixty kilometers south, and Lieutenant Dorian backtracks our course on the other side of the mountain and very low to the ground to avoid detection.
“The aux tank is dry,” Lieutenant Dorian reports when we’re on the ground and the ramp is open again. Third Platoon are filing out of the ship, carrying their dead and assisting their wounded.
“Less to drag around with us,” I say. “Right?”
“Trouble is that we also dipped into the onboard tanks. We’re down to seventy percent.”
“How much do we need to get into orbit and back on track toward the task force?” I ask.
“I wouldn’t want to try it with less than what we have right now, and preferably with a full tank. And that’s with one platoon on board, not two.”
“Well, shit.”
I unbuckle my safety harness and get up. My legs feel odd, like they’re not used to bipedal locomotion anymore. I stagger down the ramp and pull my helmet off to breathe some unfiltered morning air. Sergeant Fallon trots up to me and nods at the bodies Third Platoon’s troopers are laying out in the dirt a few dozen meters away.
“What the hell happened? Once you guys were over the ridge, we couldn’t get shit on TacLink.”
“We saved Third Platoon’s asses. Snatched them off the ground in the middle of a Shrike strafing run.”
Sergeant Fallon winces. “That’s a tough day at the office.”
“Blackfly Three is toast. Pilot and crew chief burned up with the wreck. And Third Platoon has three KIA.”
“What about the Shrike?”
“We clipped it with a pair of Tridents. Then another pair of Shrikes came in just as we were off the ground. And those motherfuckers chased us for thirty klicks. Did you know you can launch Tridents from an open tail ramp?”
Sergeant Fallon laughs and shakes her head.
“You scored an air-to-air kill on a Shrike. From a moving drop ship.”
“I didn’t. But Corporal Santiago and Private Keenan did.”
“Holy hell.” She laughs again. “I think that’s a first. And then what?”
The other Blackfly appears above the ridge to our east with startling suddenness, the engines barely louder than a spirited conversation. I nod at it and exhale sharply.
“And then Blackfly Two saved all our asses.”
We watch as the drop ship swoops in for a landing. The ship sets down fifty meters from Blackfly One, the skids kissing the ground so lightly they barely kick up any dust. Then the war machine settles on the skids, like a raptor hunkering down over a kill, and the engine noise recedes.
“One of the Shrike pilots bailed,” I say to Sergeant Fallon, barely needing to raise my voice over the engine drone. “Looks like we have ourselves our first traitor brigade POW.”
Sergeant Fallon perks up. “Really now. Let’s go say hello.”
“And quite possibly good-bye,” I add, and glance over to the spot where the platoon medics are working on the dead and injured troopers.
The captured pilot stands off to the side, fifty meters from the Blackfly. He has his wrists locked together with a set of flex cuffs, and two SI troopers are flanking him. Halley is pacing in front of him, fixing him with an icy glare. Sergeant Fallon and I walk over to where they are standing to join the interrogation.
“Have a seat, Captain.” The rank designation comes out of Halley’s mouth with a heaping dollop of acid. She points to a nearby supply crate.
The Shrike pilot is a tall guy with thinning hair. He’s supporting his left arm with his right. I can tell he’s trying to look tough, but he can’t quite pull it off at the sight of all the armed SI troopers milling around and shooting him very unfriendly looks. The name tape on his flight suit says BEALS.
“I think I’d rather stand,” Captain Beals says. “So you don’t just shoot me in the back of the head.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” Halley nods at the two SI troopers on either side of Captain Beals, and they yank him down to the ground by the sleeves of his flight suit. He yelps out with pain, but makes no effort to get up again.
“Trust me, motherfucker. If I wanted to shoot you, I would have done it on the ground where you landed,” she says. “Save the weight for the trip back here.”
“What’s your unit, Captain?” I ask. He turns his head to look at me. I must not seem very threatening—or he may have decided on the spot that my rank doesn’t merit cooperation—because he just shakes his head with a smirk.
“I’m not telling you a goddamn thing other than rank and name and service num—”
Sergeant Fallon steps forward and kicks him in the middle of the chest with one solid, well-placed boot sole. He flies backward off the supply crate and lands hard on the rocky ground. Before he can even start to get back up, she pulls her sidearm from her thigh holster. The pilot starts to get up, but freezes when he sees the targeting laser of the pistol in the middle of his chest.
“Here’s how this is going to work, sport,” she says. “You will answer the lieutenant and the captain here very promptly and truthfully. If you do not, I will start using you as a backstop for some target practice. Don’t believe me, open your fucking mouth with attitude again.”
Captain Beals swallows whatever words of protest he was about to blurt out. He looks at me and Halley, and the defiant expression on his face is gone.
“She has shot people for less,” I say.
“You can’t torture or injure me on purpose,” he says very neutrally and carefully. “That’s a war crime.”
Sergeant Fallon sighs and lowers herself into a squat right in front of him, and he flinches. She reaches out with her gun hand and taps him on the head with the weapon, and he flinches again, only harder.
“One,” she says. “We aren’t at war with you. Ain’t no treaty that covers this sort of shit, unless you went and joined the SRA or the Euros. Did you join the SRA or the Euros, Captain?”
He shakes his head.
“Two,” she says, and taps him on the head with her gun again. “Don’t be talking law. The law is not your friend right now. If the law is still in effect, you motherfuckers are all guilty of high treason, desertion in wartime, and theft of crucial assets, and we can hold a field tribunal and shoot every single one of you legally, on the spot. And if the law is not in effect anymore, I can do whatever the fuck I want to you. Do you understand me?”
The captain nods slowly. He looks like he wants to argue the point, but he’s smart enough to hold his tongue.
“Three,” she says, and reaches out again to tap him with the gun. He flinches away from the weapon, and she smiles without humor.
“You and your flyboy friends used your stolen Shrikes to kill three of our men and injure a few more. Those guys over there with the rifles? You killed their friends. I don’t think any of them would be sad to see me put one between your eyes and leave you here to rot. And you destroyed one of our rides, which is worth—how much is one of those Blackflies worth, Captain Halley?” she asks in our direction.
“A trillion kabillion dollars,” Halley replies.
“A trillion kabillion dollars,” Sergeant Fallon repeats to Captain Beals, stern-faced. “And they’re priceless to me, because we need them to get off this rock and back home once we are done with you people.”
“You raided our airbase,” Captain Beals replies carefully. “You killed twenty-seven personnel and damaged twelve Shrikes. You didn’t even warn us.”
“We did that,” Sergeant Fallon says. “And we were in the right because of this.” She points to the NAC flag patch on her armor. “Because we are with the Commonwealth Defense Corps. And whatever you people call yourselves now, you are not it. Not anymore. So everything we do to you is legal. And everything you do to us is criminal activity.”
“We were under orders to leave Earth. From the president of the Commonwealth.”
“That’s bullshit,” I interject. “Those were illegal orders. And you don’t follow those. That’s the first thing they teach you in NCO school, for fuck’s sake. A fresh corporal one year out of boot camp knows that.”
“The guy who is giving the orders around here isn’t the president of the Commonwealth,” Halley says. “He stopped being that when he left his post and went through that Alcubierre node. So try again, Captain.”
Captain Beals stares at Halley, but doesn’t reply.
“What is your unit, Captain?” I ask again. His eyes dart to me, then to Sergeant Fallon—or more precisely, the pistol in her hand. She studies him without emotion, like someone might look at an interesting scientific specimen, which is somehow more unsettling than if she had clear anger on her face.
“Strike Fighter Squadron 22,” he says after a moment.
“Off NACS Pollux?” I ask, and he nods.
“We’re dirtside now. Redeployed.”
“All the squadrons from Pollux are down here now?”
Captain Beals nods.
“How many?”
“Four,” he says. “We dispersed them on the moon.”
“Which base did we hit the other day?”
“That was Strike Fighter Squadron 85,” Captain Beals replies. “You took out all their ships except for one.”
“Yeah, we were in a hurry,” Sergeant Fallon says. “We’ll try to do better next time.”
“They’re all on alert now. You can’t pull that off again. Not with what you have here.” Captain Beals nods at the nearby SI troopers.
“Why didn’t you run radar from the beginning?” Halley asks. “In fact, why aren’t you lighting up the approaches to the moon? We made it all the way from the node to this place without picking up any active radiation. Why did you choose to stay blind out here?”
Captain Beals looks at her and raises an eyebrow. “You mean you haven’t figured that out yet?”
“Figured what out?”
He laughs quietly before replying. “It’s how the Lankies find us. They’re attracted to radio waves. Radar in particular. Comms relays. Everything that puts out more than a few dozen watts. Using radar in space is like turning on a flashlight in a dark room. Like hanging out a welcome sign.”
“Son of a bitch,” I say. For a second or two, I have to suppress the urge to take the pistol from Sergeant Fallon’s hand and smack it against the side of the pilot’s head to wipe the smarmy little smile out of the corners of his mouth. “How very fucking nice of you all to share that bit of intel before you left us all to the Lankies.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Captain Beals says. “Not for the Solar System. You can’t turn all that shit back off and stay quiet forever. Besides, they already know where you are. It’s too late to hide.”
“That’s why you don’t have any perimeter security worth a shit,” Sergeant Fallon muses. “You’re not expecting human visitors. You’re geared to fight Lankies. You figured we’d be gone by now.”
Captain Beals just shrugs, that little smirk still in the corners of his mouth.
“Four Shrike wings, minus the one we sidelined,” I say. “How many ground troops?”
Captain Beals looks up at me, then glances at Sergeant Fallon, who is still holding the pistol, and who is in striking distance of his head with it. She gives him an encouraging nod.
“One battalion, plus the garrison company that was here already.”
“Bullshit,” I say. “A Navigator can haul a whole regiment. You came here with a million tons of passenger tonnage and a supercarrier, and you only brought a battalion with you?”
“It’s true. We had to clear space for gear and civvies. Lots of dependent families. Flight deck was ass-to-nose with supplies and spare parts. You have no idea what kind of a mess that was.”
“My heart breaks for you,” Halley says dryly. “Bet you that wasn’t shit compared to the mess you left the rest of us with.”
“We were under orders,” he says. “You get an order from the president and the joint chiefs to evacuate the system, you follow it. Simple as that.”
“I get an order from the president and the joint chiefs to abandon billions of people to the Lankies, I tell them to go fuck themselves,” Halley replies sharply. “Simple as that.”
Sergeant Fallon gets up from her crouching position and holsters her pistol.
“I want to take this asshole back home with us,” she says. “I want to take him to Detroit and drop him in the middle of the PRC. See what the hood rats think of his orders from the goddamn president.”
“I have no particular issue with that idea,” Halley says, and nods over toward the SI troopers, who are carrying three body bags up the ramp of Blackfly One’s cargo hold. “We have the space for another passenger or two. I’ll even help you push him out of the fucking ship.”
The computer in my armor bleeps a warning tone. I put on my helmet again to check the visor display for the cause of the alert. On the TacLink map, a radar search cone is moving in our direction from the northwest. Almost simultaneously, Lieutenant Dorian sends a warning through the company channel.
“Enemy air coming in from three-two-zero degrees. Forty klicks out, running active ground radar.”
Behind us, Blackfly One’s engines are starting up with a low whoosh.
Halley and I exchange glances. Then she starts running back toward her ship, putting her helmet back on her head along the way.
“Get everyone on board for dustoff right now,” she shouts into the Company channel. “Split Third Platoon between both ships. And hog-tie that Shrike jock so he can’t hit any buttons.”
Three minutes later, our two-ship formation is flying away from the patrolling Shrike’s radar cone at low altitude, polychromatic armor active. Unless the Shrikes have already spotted us and locked their fire-control radar on us, we can hide from them easily enough. But that requires staying in motion, burning precious fuel we don’t have to spare. Sooner or later, we’ll be stranded somewhere with dry tanks, and then all the stealth technology won’t do us a bit of good.
Halley and Lieutenant Dorian spend the next twenty minutes threading a course between the likely detection bubbles of two patrolling Shrikes. They are focusing their search efforts on the low mountain ridge where we set up our last two deployment points, and we take a westerly course and leave the shelter of the mountains behind reluctantly. With nothing better to do, I watch the optical feed from our passive gear again as it maps the landscape outside and translates it into coordinates and icons on the TacLink map. But as we stay aloft and on the move for an hour and then another, I can’t help but wonder to what end I am collecting recon data that nobody else will get to see.
Finally, our pilots find an acceptable new deployment point to put down the Blackflies again, hundreds of kilometers to the northwest of our old landing spot. It’s a forested plateau dotted with little lakes, and the terrain is just hilly enough to offer a radar shadow to hide in. Halley and Lieutenant Dorian set down their ships in two separate clearings a few hundred meters apart.
“You know the drill,” Sergeant Fallon announces to the platoon-and-a-half in the cargo hold. “Perimeter security, three-sixty degrees. Eyes and ears, people.”
Outside, the engines come to a stop. A few moments later, Lieutenant Dorian comes out of the cockpit passage. I unplug myself from the console, take my helmet off, and follow him down the ramp and into the sunlight.
“What’s the fuel situation?” I ask.
“Thirty percent, plus the emergency reserve,” he says, and I suck in air sharply and imitate a flinch.
“We are hauling so much weight around at low level, I’m not sure I could even make orbit with what’s left. Not with sixty troops packed into the back of the ship.”
“Well, shit,” I say. “I guess we need to be looking for a fuel stop on this rock.”
“I suspect they won’t be greeting us with open arms if we just show up at the nearest Shrike base for a refill,”
Lieutenant Dorian replies.
“I’m down to two-thirds,” Halley says when we set up our little command post in the woods between Blackfly One and Two. Our three platoons are dispersed in the woods, as much for keeping them out of harm’s way in case the drop ships get spotted from the air as for physical security.
“We spend another day dodging Shrikes, we’ll be down to nothing,” Lieutenant Dorian says. “And then we’ll have no mobility beyond our boots.”
“Remember Willoughby?” I ask Halley.
“What about it?”
“Well, they had spare fuel at the terraforming stations. We saw at least three of those that were cold. You think they have fuel storage there?”
“They wouldn’t leave fifty thousand gallons of JP-101 in the ground,” Halley says. “Not in a place like this.”
“Then we need to find a different fuel source. Or put what’s left to better use than running away until we can’t.”
“What did you have in mind, Lieutenant?” Halley asks me.
“Let me talk to that Shrike jock again,” I say.
“What can I do for you, Lieutenant?” Captain Beals says, in a tone of voice that makes it very clear that he’s not terribly interested in doing anything for me at this time. He looks past me and eyes Sergeant Fallon nervously, who is sitting on a fallen tree fifty meters away and opening a meal pouch with her combat knife in a very unsubtle manner. We are in a clearing in the nearby woods, just barely out of sight and earshot of the drop ship and the SI troopers gathered around it.
“I’m not going to play good cop, bad cop with you, Captain,” I say. “I’m not half as good at threatening people as Sergeant Fallon. I’m planning on appealing to your self-interest.”
“Oh,” he says, with a sardonic little inflection. “Well, I wish you the best of luck with that, Lieutenant.”
“You better hope I’m successful. Because if I lose my patience with you, I’ll stop being a moderating influence on the master sergeant over there.”