Orders of Battle (Frontlines)

by Marko Kloos

  The other end of the platform has another two-meter drop. I jump down and let the armor cushion the impact. The next section is a twenty-meter run of knee-high tunnel that has to be navigated while crawling. I dive to the deck and make my way through the dark tube on elbows and knees. Ever since my near-death experience in the Lanky tunnels on Greenland, I’ve had a phobia of dark and confined spaces, so I rush through this obstacle as quickly as I can to reach the light at the end of it.

  The course is pretty grueling, even for a SOCOM troop in power-assisted battle armor. Every obstacle is designed to require the use of a different group of muscles. By the time I’ve reached the end, I’ve run, dodged, climbed, jumped, and crawled through two hundred fifty meters of increasingly demanding structures, and every part of my body aches with fatigue. But it feels good to sweat in earnest again, and the backdrop of armed spacecraft serves as a motivator, a welcome reminder that I am training for a fight again instead of a yearly physical fitness evaluation for my personnel file.

  “Not bad,” First Sergeant Gallegos says when I take off my helmet and walk over to the spot where he is keeping score.

  “Let’s see,” I say, and he holds up his PDP so I can look at the screen with the results. When I see the numbers, I flinch a little. Of all the STT troops who have run the course so far, my time places me solidly toward the bottom of the middle.

  “Good God. Who’s Sergeant Khan? I’m a minute and a half slower.”

  “Khan’s in the Spaceborne Rescue section. Third Squad. He’s a freak of nature. I swear he could outrun a Lanky even without power assist.”

  “I can’t keep up with these kids anymore, Gallegos. Not even with a juiced bug suit.”

  “Neither can I, sir,” the first sergeant says. “It’s a young man’s game. But you’re still forty-five seconds above the cutoff. I’d say you have a few years still.”

  “Thank you. I’m glad I know my expiration date now.”

  I watch as the rest of the STT troopers make their way around the obstacle course. They’re all young and fit, highly trained soldiers in their physical prime. As always in joint units made up from different specialties, there’s a good-natured competition going on between the sections. The ones who are finished with the course take turns motivating the others with cheers and shouted encouragements. All around the obstacle course, maintenance crew and deck hands are watching the SOCOM soldiers tearing through the exercises. These kids are the new generation of special operations troops, trained and raised to the trident or the scarlet beret after the desperate rear-guard battles we had to fight in the first five years of the war. But they’re every bit as fast and strong as First Sergeant Gallegos and I ever were, and maybe more so. The food has improved greatly again, and the new tactics we bled to develop on the battlefield are now part of the classroom curriculum in Combat Controller School and SEAL training. The military is no longer underfed, stretched to the breaking point, or forced to fight unwinnable battles with unsuitable weapons. Every bit of the world’s military spending and R&D in the last half decade has gone toward the effort against the Lankies, and these men and women are part of the return on that massive investment.

  “That’s the whole lot,” Gallegos says when the last STT soldiers have made it around the concourse. “We’re going to leave the obstacle course up until 1700. One of the SI companies asked to use it. They’ve volunteered to do the takedown and stowing for us after they’re done.”

  “Fine with me. As long as the jarheads don’t break our stuff. You know those SI grunts.”

  Gallegos nods with a mock expression of parental sternness.

  “Lock ’em in a room with two anvils, and in ten minutes they’ll have lost one and broken the other,” he says.

  I leave the first sergeant to his business and wander off onto the middle of the flight deck while the STT troopers gather to head back to their quarters for post-exercise showers. It’s soothing to be in the center of so much new firepower, even if it’s a reminder that I’m on a warship that’s headed into harm’s way. But it no longer feels like we are at a breaking point, and that the end of the world is just one lost battle away.

  I walk along the long rows of drop ships, dozens of advanced Dragonfly-F models and a handful of Blackflies, our special operations birds. The ones we used to infiltrate the Arcadia colony were painted in a flat black that seemed to absorb the light. These new Blackflies are no longer black at all. Instead, they are wearing the same white-and-orange paint as the Dragonflies and Super Shrikes next to them. Visual stealth was good against other humans, but Lankies don’t have eyes. Even the camouflage patterns on our field uniforms are pointless now, but we keep them because they make us feel more soldierly than walking around in high-visibility colors.

  There’s an open section on the deck between the drop-ship parking spots and the Super Shrike attack craft. It’s maybe fifty meters square and marked off with a red-and-white line. Several civilian techs are busy with gear that’s unfamiliar to me. One of them is standing next to a row of knee-high devices that look like enormous twenty-sided dice. A diagnostics cable is laid out on the deck, with connectors leading to each device. They make me think of mines, but I dismiss the thought immediately because there are no ordnance flags on them, and I know that neither our ammo handlers nor the civilian techs would handle live munitions or explosives without warning labels. I walk over to the tech who is holding a hand terminal that’s plugged into the end of the diagnostics line.

  “What on earth are those things?” I ask.

  The tech turns to look at me. She wears her long brown hair tied up in a ponytail, a very uncommon sight on a warship, where almost all the female troops keep their hair short enough to fit under a helmet. The name tag on her overalls says “FISHER, C.”

  “They haven’t really settled on an official letter salad for the designation,” she says. “But they’re drones. The R&D techs call them ‘Wonderballs.’”

  “Wonderballs,” I repeat. “What’s so wondrous about them? If it’s not a secret, I mean.”

  I take a closer look at the nearest device. The surface is faceted, and every one of the facets has a variety of sensor windows set into it.

  “It’s basically a ball of high-powered optical sensors,” she says. “Plus laser-based comms gear. All wrapped around a power cell and tied into a central processing core. It’s for the new early-warning network, Arachne. But don’t ask me what that stands for. We haven’t come up with a cool backronym yet.”

  “How new is that? It’s the first time I’ve heard about it.”

  “Well,” Technician Fisher says. “This will be the first field deployment, actually.”

  She points her stylus at the row of drones.

  “The ship carries a few hundred of these. They come in packs of twelve, launched with a deployment drone. We float them out a few hundred thousand kilometers, and they’ll auto-deploy into formation. Extends our bubble of awareness by a factor of twenty.”

  “I thought seed ships were too hard to spot for mobile early-warning systems,” I say.

  “These don’t spot Lanky seed ships. Well, not exactly.”

  She smiles when she sees my puzzled expression.

  “We beat our heads against that wall for a while. Then we finally figured out that if we can’t see what’s there, we can program these to see what isn’t there. Like the light from a star that blinks out when a seed ship passes in front of it. Or the light from another Wonderball.”

  “An optical trip wire,” I say, and she nods.

  “These have twenty optical lens clusters pointing in every direction. No need to turn it a certain way because all orientations are right. And the neural core does all the thinking. Every Wonderball is linked to every other one. And when one of them sees that a light is going out where it shouldn’t, all the others know it, too, at the speed of light.”

  “Not bad,” I say. “Not bad at all.”

  “And the best part? It’s all without active
radiation. There’s a low-power comms laser that sends telemetry back to us, but that’s it. The power cell and all the neural networking inside is EM shielded. The Lankies may notice one if they fly past and they’re close enough to bump it with their hull. Other than that, it’s just inert space debris.”

  “Clever,” I say. “Let’s hope they work as advertised. It would be nice if we could see a seed ship coming from a long way out.”

  “They’ll work,” Technician Fisher says with conviction. “I’ve been busy with the software and hardware integration for a year and a half now. You’ll be able to spot seed ships for the Orions from a few hundred thousand kilometers out.”

  “If we deploy them along the right vector,” I say, and she shrugs.

  “I don’t work on the tactics. Just on the nuts and bolts, and the computer code.”

  Something about her pleasant, earnest face and her small frame in bulky shipboard overalls triggers a vague recollection in my brain.

  “Have we met?” I ask. “You look familiar. Have you been on a deployment with the Fleet before?”

  She hesitates for a moment and then nods slowly.

  “I was on the PACS field test team on Ottawa. Four years ago.”

  Now that she has put a missing piece into the puzzle, my brain rushes to supply the rest.

  “That’s right. You were one of the exo jockeys,” I say with a smile. “You guys saved our asses down on New Svalbard. Without the PACS support, they would have overrun us.”

  “It was just supposed to be a field test,” she replies. “Never thought I’d be in the back of a drop ship on the way into battle. With live ordnance on the rails. But there was nobody else around who was trained.”

  “Yeah, the Lankies had their own timetable. None of us thought it’d be anything more than a training cruise.”

  “I never want to be that close to any of those things again,” she says. “I tried to tell myself it was just a day at the range. But that didn’t work so well once I was on the ground.”

  I recognize the haunted expression that flits across her face as she recalls the memory, and I guess that her nightmares probably look a lot like mine. The civilian contractors volunteered to be dropped onto the battlefield when we were holding New Longyearbyen against what seemed like hundreds of Lankies, in the middle of a blinding snowstorm that neutralized our long-range weapons and our air support. They shored up our flanks with the PACS and stemmed the tide long enough for us to get all the colonists off the moon, but the battle was like a knife fight in a frozen meat locker. I can’t imagine the terror they must have felt to be going into battle without military training or mental preparation. It was against every regulation in the book, but it let us turn a certain defeat into a draw, and the brave R&D techs saved many hundreds of lives that day.

  “Andrew Grayson,” I say and offer my hand. “I’m in charge of the special tactics team on this ship. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you and those PACS. And don’t take this as a come-on, but I’d love to buy you a drink or two at the RecFac sometime.”

  The small and fleeting smile she gives me in reply looks like she’s not quite sure whether I am serious or making fun of her. Then she accepts the handshake.

  “I’m Callista Fisher. I’m the lead tech for the R&D team,” she says. “I don’t really drink. But I appreciate the offer. It’s good to know that we made a difference.”

  “I felt bad that we had to leave all the exos behind. After all your efforts.”

  “We didn’t have the time or space to load them up,” she says. “I barely made the last drop ship. I think the Lankies were maybe a hundred meters behind us when we took off and left the place. But I built that machine. Drove it almost every day for over a year. It wasn’t great to see it sitting there on the airfield when the tail ramp went up.”

  “Like an abandoned puppy,” I say.

  She waves her hand in a dismissive gesture. “Just a machine, right? We got to build new ones. They’re just things.”

  “We get attached to things,” I say. “Especially when they’ve served to save our lives. You wouldn’t believe how much I love my bug suit.”

  Technician Fisher flashes that unsure smile again, as if she’s still trying to figure out if I am genuine. Then the terminal in her hands lets out a series of low beeps, and she seems almost relieved to be able to pay attention to it.

  “I don’t usually drink,” she says. “Only when things go really sideways. The only time I’ve ever really gotten drunk was when we got back in from the New Svalbard evac. The infantry guys said it would help with the shaking knees.”

  She taps a few things on her terminal’s screen and furrows her brows.

  “And right now I need to get back to figuring out why Wonderball eighty-three here is still stuck in a boot loop even after two hard resets of the processing core. But I may take you up on your offer at some point. Might be nice to try a drink for recreation instead of stress relief.”

  “Look me up if you do,” I reply. “Those of us who were at New Svalbard made a pledge that none of the PACS drivers from that day will ever have to buy their own booze again if one of us is around.”

  “I will,” she says. “I just hope it won’t be because things have gone sideways again. I feel like I’ve fulfilled my lifetime quota for unexpected close combat.”

  Overhead, a 1MC announcement starts blaring.

  “All command-level officers, report to the flag briefing room at 1730 Zulu. I repeat, all command-level officers report to the flag briefing room at 1730 Zulu.”

  I check my chrono. A command-level meeting can only be called by the skipper. Whatever the subject of the briefing, it’s important enough to hold it on short notice. Right now it’s 1633, which means I barely have time to turn in my armor and get a shower.

  As I make my way to the forward bulkhead at a trot, I look back at Technician Fisher, who is focused on her hand terminal again. She’s probably around my age, but somehow she looks too young in her bulky overalls among all the war material on the deck.

  Let’s hope it’s just a bullshit briefing, I think, even though I know that no skipper with any sense calls those on short notice. I suspect that we’re about to find out what task the Fleet has thought up for us, and I’ve been in the service for too long to hope for a milk run to a training range. Any podhead with more than six months in the Fleet who’s still an optimist is either naive or a complete moron.

  CHAPTER 9

  MARCHING ORDERS

  “Glad you could join us, Major,” the XO says when I walk into the flag briefing room. All the other command officers are already assembled. I check my chrono to see that I am thirty-eight seconds late. I could point out that I am the only member of the command quintet who had to turn in a set of combat armor and shower before the short-notice briefing, but I take a seat without commenting on Lieutenant Colonel Campbell’s little dig.

  Everyone in the briefing room outranks me. Three of them are colonels—the ship’s CO, Colonel Drake; the commander of the air and space group, Colonel Pace; and the commanding officer of the SI regiment, Colonel Rigney. The next one down the rank ladder is Lieutenant Colonel Campbell, the executive officer of the carrier. As a major, I am on the low end of the totem pole here. But as the leader of the special tactics team, I am not subordinate to either the CAG or the Spaceborne Infantry. The STT is attached to the SI regiment during combat ops, but it remains in the Fleet command structure, so my direct superior is the ship’s commander. I look at Colonel Drake to see if he shares his XO’s mood, but he merely nods at me and returns his attention to the PDP in his right hand. I try to divine the nature of the briefing from the expression on his face. He seems focused and somber, which is not an encouraging sign.

  Here we go, I think.

  “All right, listen up,” Colonel Drake says. He looks around at everyone and leans forward in his chair, then folds his hands on the tabletop in front of him. “We finally have our marching orders, and they are .
. . interesting.”

  “Uh-oh,” Colonel Pace says in a wry tone. He’s tall for a pilot and almost unreasonably good-looking, flashing perfect ’burber teeth in a boyish smile.

  “I’m sure you’re about to give us your definition of interesting,” Colonel Rigney says. He’s the only other person in the room wearing camouflage fatigues, a stern-faced grunt with a severe-looking gray regulation buzzcut.

  “There’s a lot to unpack,” Colonel Drake replies. He activates the holographic projector in the middle of the briefing table and links his PDP to it. Then he brings up a star chart that depicts a slice of the inner solar system.

  “All right, let’s start with the setup. We are not heading for Mars, but you’ve all figured that out already. We are on the way to an assembly point outside of the asteroid belt. Once we get there, we will wait for the rest of our entourage for this mission. We are going to form a joint task force with ACS Johannesburg and her battle group. That’s CVB-67, the African Commonwealth’s shiny new Mark II Avenger.”

  Colonel Pace lets out a low whistle. “A two-Avenger task force. That’s not going to be a training run, is it?”

  “Only in the context of letting Jo’burg and her crew get some deployment experience under our experienced tutelage,” Colonel Drake says. “Our combat systems will be fully integrated. This will be the first time one of the allied Avengers deploys into combat with us. They’ve done a turn above Mars since their commissioning, so they’ve fired war shots before. But this is going to be their first out-of-system deployment. So we’ll be their backup, and they’ll be ours.”

  “I’m not sure how I feel about having to teach the ropes to a green carrier crew,” the XO says. “Colonial deployments could mean Lanky contact. That’s a pretty unforgiving learning environment.”