by Marko Kloos
The decon cycle takes three minutes, which are the longest three minutes of my life so far. Then the light on the decon lock goes green, and I step out of the lock and into the facility, which is in a state of controlled chaos. There are injured troops on stretchers lining the hallways and packing the first few rooms I poke my head into.
“What are you looking for, trooper? Are you injured?”
A stern-faced, harried-looking woman in a medical outfit stops me as I try to check the next room.
“I’m looking for the pilot someone brought in maybe twenty, thirty minutes ago. Female, dark hair, tall.”
“This look like a Fleet rehab facility to you? With visiting hours? We are stitching people back together right now. Wouldn’t have to if you hadn’t started a shooting war in the middle of a civilian settlement.” She puts her hand on the chest plate of my armor and tries to push me away from the door.
“Don’t,” I growl.
She gives my gun on its sling a concerned look and pulls her hand away from my armor. Then she looks around, doubtlessly for help to deal with this irate knucklehead soldier who showed up in a medical facility armed to the teeth.
“They’re stacking the arrivals wherever they can find them. If she came in half an hour ago, she’s probably in the surgery queue up in the A hallway on the second floor.”
“Thank you,” I say, and run over to the staircase without waiting for an answer.
Halley is almost as tall as I am, but she looks strangely tiny on the stretcher. The left sleeve and leg of her flight suit have been cut away, and she’s wearing bulky gel stabilizers on both limbs on her left side. The left side of her face is swollen and colored in vivid shades of purple and black, but she’s still recognizably Halley. Her hair is matted with blood and sticking to her skull. There’s an automatic med injector strapped to her right forearm, and she’s barely conscious, probably in a deep and warm painkiller haze.
“Hey,” I say, and kneel down next to her stretcher. I can’t take her hand because it’s tied down, so I just stroke her forehead. Where my hand touches her hair, it comes away with half-congealed blood. “Hey, you.”
Her eyelids flutter a little, and I can see that she’s trying to focus.
“Huh,” she says, more an exhalation than a word.
“You look like hammered shit,” I say.
“Mmmmh,” she replies, with the tiniest of smiles in the corners of her mouth. “Goddamn capsule broke my goddamn leg,” she mumbles.
“And your arm, and a bunch of other stuff.”
“Had better days,” she says.
“I haven’t,” I reply, and she smiles groggily.
“Did we win?”
I consider her question for a moment.
“We didn’t lose,” I say. “They surrendered. Masoud set off a nuclear demo charge on the main terraformer.”
“Nukes,” Halley mumbles. “Jesus. Can’t believe I slept through that.”
I look at my bruised and battered wife, one of two drop ship pilots left alive on this mission. We’ve lost so many today, and I will grieve for Lieutenant Dorian and all the dead troopers from First and Second Platoons later, when the smoke and the adrenaline have settled and I am alone with my thoughts again. But right now, I am selfishly and unapologetically happy that Halley is alive.
She grimaces and fumbles for the button that controls the med injector. I take her hand, put it back onto the stretcher, and push the button for her.
“Thanks,” she murmurs. “’s good stuff.”
“I’m familiar with it,” I reply, but she’s already drifting off.
“I’ll be back for you later,” I say, and she mumbles inarticulate assent.
The SEALs arrive in their drop ship half an hour later, while we are busy stacking captured weapons on the plaza. I’ve never hated any one group of my own podhead community as much as I loathe the Space-Air-Land commandos that come trotting down the ramp of their Blackfly, clad head to toe in HEBA suits.
“They’ve been in bug suits all along,” I say to Sergeant Fallon. “They spent the last week in stealth and sneaking around while we were busy sticking our collective dicks into the local beehives.”
“The term you are looking for is ‘cannon fodder,’” Sergeant Fallon says. “Motherfucker used us as bait. We were the diversion. So his SOCOM heroes could sneak around undetected and stick nukes everywhere while the Shrikes were busy chasing us down.”
Major Masoud brings up the rear. He’s in a bug suit as well, but he’s carrying his helmet under his arm. He stops at the top of the ramp and looks around with an unsmiling face. Then he puts the helmet on his head, and a second later, the personality projector built into the HEBA suits makes his face appear on the outside of the helmet, making it look like the bug suit dome has an actual visor. Then he trots down the ramp and steps onto the ash-covered asphalt of the admin plaza. I throw the M-66 in my hands onto a pile of identical weapons and walk over to where the SEALs are getting their bearings.
“Lieutenant,” Major Masoud says. “I’m happy that my instinct about you was correct. You almost pulled this off without the SEAL platoon.”
I have the sudden impulse to unhook my PDW from its carrying sling and put a hundred-round burst into the major’s face. But with Halley alive, my sense of self-preservation has returned, and I have no interest in getting shot on the spot by his SEALs in this irradiated shithole.
“You used me,” I say. “You used the whole SI detachment. Three platoons of distraction. So you and your boys could bring the place to its knees.”
“Yes, I did,” he says. “I needed their eyes on your platoon so they wouldn’t look where it counted. And make no mistake, Lieutenant, I’d do it again tomorrow.”
“We lost thirty-eight men and three drop ships,” I say.
“And we got off easy,” he replies. “We won. And we got it done with minimal casualties. Do you have any idea how many we would have lost if the Fleet had staged a full task force for the raid? Gone head-to-head against those ships in orbit? Thousands of lives, Lieutenant. Yes, I’ll trade thirty-eight troopers and a handful of drop ships for that.”
I glare at him, murder in my heart.
“You were willing to nuke every single terraforming plant on this moon?”
He nods. “Believe it. Although I bluffed a little. We only had time to set the charges on fourteen of them. We had to cut things short when you staged your assault.” He smiles a very sparse smile. “That was excellent initiative. When we get back, I’m putting you and the other platoon leaders in for some major awards.”
“I don’t want any,” I say. “I don’t want a thing from you. I don’t do your kind of war.”
Major Masoud shakes his head.
“There’s no ‘my kind of war,’” he says. “There’s only war. It’s about breaking the enemy as quickly and thoroughly as possible, by any means necessary. That’s all it is. That’s our business, Lieutenant.”
“You were looking forward to this. You came here just to stomp these people and make them bleed.”
“I came here to win the battle,” he says. “So we can take it to the Lankies and win the war.”
“I’ll believe that when I see you in formation with the rest of us to drop onto Mars. With all those kids they’re training as cannon fodder for you and your high-speed brotherhood here.”
“You will,” he says. “Portsmouth and Berlin will be in orbit in two days and take command of the renegade task force for the transit back to Earth. And then we’ll get ready for the main event. With the gear in orbit here, we’ll double the Fleet’s combat power. We’re bringing back a supercarrier and six capital ships, Lieutenant. We’ll both be on the ground on Mars in a month or two.”
“Yes sir,” I say, and sketch a cursory salute that’s just on this side of insubordination. I know he’s right, and I hate the knowledge, the near certainty that I would have made the exact same trade in his stead. A hundred dead and three drop ships gone, traded
for a quarter-million tons of first-rate warships to take into battle against the Lankies. A hundred deaths for the chance to save hundreds of millions, maybe the entire human race. I’ll come to terms with it later. But right now I am angry at the man who made that call for us all, without letting us in on the whole plan.
“Your wife doing all right?” Sergeant Fallon asks a little later, when we’ve finished stacking rifles and sitting down in the shell-marked vestibule of the admin building. I’m so tired I don’t even have the energy to open a ration bag—not that it’s advisable to eat outside when irradiated particles are falling from the sky.
“She has more broken bones than intact ones,” I say. “The ejection capsule closed on her arm and leg when she bailed. Crushed them both in half a dozen places. Broke her hip, too.”
“They’ll stitch her back together,” she replies. Then she stretches out her leg—the artificial one—and gives her titanium shinbone a good rap with her armored fist.
“I didn’t get a scratch on me this time,” I say. “Nothing. Not even a bruised knuckle. I’ve had guys blown in half right in front of me, and I didn’t shed a drop of blood. Doesn’t seem right, does it?”
“You’ve bled your share,” she says. “You have credit.”
We watch the scene in front of us—the troops clearing rubble and carting away weapons and body bags, the civvies milling around in radiation ponchos, the smoke still pouring into the nighttime sky from the dozens of fires our battle kindled. We turned a paradise into something worse than the shittiest PRC on Earth, a post-apocalyptic, irradiated urban wasteland. The population of Arcadia City has already begun the evacuation to the other settlements, because this place isn’t livable anymore, and won’t be for decades to come. And I have no doubt that Major Masoud would have let the other settlements suffer a similar fate if the chief of staff hadn’t taken charge and surrendered his troops unilaterally, without word from the president, who is still in his hiding hole deep underneath the admin center. I know that what we did was necessary, but I can’t bring myself to say that it was right.
There’s only war, I hear Major Masoud in my head. And it occurs to me that despite all his experience and his Medal of Honor, the major is wrong about the nature of this profession to which he dedicated his life. There’s war against the Lankies, which is right and necessary and a question of survival. And then there’s war against our own—the SRA, the renegades, the welfare rats, the smaller nations on Earth—which is stupid and wasteful and demoralizing to the extreme. I’m willing to risk and give my life fighting the former, but I am tired to the bone of fighting the latter.
“I’m going to go check on the troops,” I say, and get up. “They’ve had a shit day.”
Sergeant Fallon shakes her head.
“That’s what you don’t get yet,” she says. “We’ve all had a rough day. But those guys and girls are already sharing battle stories in the shower. It’s how you get over shit like seeing your buddy get blown to pieces in front of your eyes without losing your fucking mind.” She stands up and brushes the concrete dust from her leg armor.
“And in twenty years, if we still exist as a species, they’ll be having drinks at their reunions. And you know how they will remember today? They’ll say it was one of the best days of their lives.”
She pats me on the arm and nods toward the rubble-strewn hallway in front of us.
“Come on, Lieutenant. You’ve earned a shower and a drink.”
“I’m right behind you,” I say. She nods and walks into the building. I watch as she makes her way down the hallway and disappears around the corner of the intersection.
On the western horizon, the bright blue orb of Leonidas c takes up most of the sky. On the eastern horizon, the far-off system sun creeps across the peaks of the low mountain chain where we sought refuge just two days ago. The sky in the middle graduates from blue to black to red in the span of fifty degrees. This was a beautiful place before the commandos set off that nuke, and it will be beautiful again, far prettier than most of what Earth has to offer to a low-rent hood rat like me. But right now I can’t wait to go back to our overcrowded, filthy old Earth.
Two months until Mars, I think. And now we may actually have a sliver of a chance.
Acknowledgments are terrifying to write. Regardless of how long you take or how many times you read over them, you end up forgetting someone you meant to thank. That’s because nobody writes a novel in a solitary vacuum, and the number of people that had a role in the making of the novel in your hands is as high the personnel roster of a Fleet carrier.
Major thanks to my friends at 47North, the small, hardworking, dedicated, and professional team that has published four of these novels so far: Britt Rogers, Alex Carr, Ben Smith, Adrienne Lombardo, and Jason Kirk. The FRONTLINES series wouldn’t be what it is without you, and I’ll have drinks with you all in bars with historic urinals ANY TIME.
Thanks as always to my writer friends, the Daydrinkers: Claire Humphrey, Julie Day, Erica Hildebrand, Chang Terhune, and Scott H. Andrews. Our semi-regular long weekends together keep me on track and help see things in perspective, even if they’re hell on my liver. Team Pantybear forever!
Some of you may be aware of the circumstances surrounding Lines of Departure’s 2015 Hugo nomination for Best Novel, and my subsequent withdrawing of the novel from consideration. In the wake of Sasquan, I feel compelled to offer thanks and appreciation to everyone who voiced their support.
Firstly, thanks are due to my awesome publisher 47North, who supported me in my decision even though it cost them the first Hugo nomination for the house. Thank you, Adrienne and Jason.
I want to thank my friend John Scalzi for his kind words both before the shortlist was made public, and after I withdrew my nomination. (And thank you for the most excellent bottle of single malt.)
Thank you to George R.R. Martin, who did a wonderful thing for the SF/F community in general and me and Annie Bellet in particular at the absolutely epic Hugo Losers party, and who was very kind and gracious throughout.
Thanks to the Atomic Nerds, Jess and Tom, for yet another excellent bottle of single malt, craftily dressed up by Tamara to look like a Hugo rocket (albeit one that had a repeated high-speed interface with an asteroid).
Thank you to everyone who sent me messages of support, whether via email, Facebook, Twitter, or in person. There were so many of you that I can’t list you all, but you know who you are, and you have my gratitude.
And lastly, thank you to my readers. You keep buying these books, and I get to keep writing them, and if that setup works well for all of you, it sure works for me.
While I was writing this novel, I decided to raffle off some of the names of the troopers in Andrew’s company, so I started a little contest on my blog. The naming rights for the platoon troopers fetched a total of almost $1,300 for the Semper Fi Fund, which provides immediate assistance and lifetime support for wounded, critically ill and injured service members, veterans & their families. Here are the names of the donors who got to name Spaceborne Infantry troopers:
SSGT Welch, Scott
SGT Wilsey, Martin
CPL Ponton, Chad
CPL Sharps, Nick
CPL Nealis, Rob
PFC Von der Linden, Meg
PFC Whipkey, Sean
PFC Mekker, Anthony
PVT Best, Daniel
PVT Gilroy, Alden
PVT Harris, Devin
PVT Minie, Christopher
PVT Oakley, Stan
PVT Schneider, Kurt
Photo © 2013 Robin Kloos
Marko Kloos was born and raised in Germany, in and around the city of Münster. In the past, he has been a soldier, bookseller, freight dockworker, and corporate IT administrator before he decided that he wasn’t cut out for anything other than making stuff up for a living.
Marko writes primarily science fiction and fantasy, his first genre love ever since his youth, when he spent his allowance mostly on German SF pulp se
rials. He likes bookstores, kind people, October in New England, Scotch, and long walks on the beach with Scotch.
Marko lives in New Hampshire with his wife, two children, and a roving pack of vicious dachshunds.