Orders of Battle (Frontlines)

by Marko Kloos

  “Orions are tracking true,” the tactical officer says when the missiles have reached the last phase of their intercept. “Nashville is switching the birds to autonomous terminal guidance. Velocity is one point one three percent of light speed.”

  “Don’t nobody look out of the window over there and flinch,” the XO mutters. Every set of eyeballs in the CIC is glued to the tactical display now.

  “Thirty seconds to impact on Lima-1 and 2,” Lieutenant Lawrence calls out.

  “Put the target image on the forward bulkhead, maximum magnification,” Colonel Drake says. A few moments later, the same image as on my terminal appears on the bulkhead, two long-distance visual feeds from Nashville’s sensors tiled next to each other. The seed ships are still making their way along their orbital track, sinister shapes contrasted against the cloud cover of the atmosphere.

  The two blue icons rush toward the orange ones, increasing the gap between the missiles at the last moment to home in on their respective targets thousands of kilometers apart. The first seed ship is a few minutes away from disappearing behind the equatorial horizon. The other is a quarter of a planetary circumference behind, perfectly presented in the middle of the cloud-covered sphere like the bull’s-eye in the center of a practice target.

  “Ten seconds,” Lieutenant Lawrence says.

  On the plot, the blue Vs are close enough to the orange lozenges that I can’t see any separation between them from my vantage point at the TacOps station. The time readout next to them races down toward zero. I shift my attention to the visual feeds projected onto the forward CIC bulkhead.

  The Orion missiles are much too fast to show up in the image. Both seed ships disappear in brilliant flashes of light at the same instant. The fireballs are so intensely bright that they wash out the center of the sensor feed momentarily. Nashville zooms out a few factors of magnification until the frames show the entire planetary hemisphere. Two small suns are blooming in the spots where the Lanky seed ships were making their way around the planet just a few seconds ago.

  “Kaboom,” Lieutenant Colonel Campbell says softly, deep satisfaction in her voice. Her comment is drowned out by the claps and low cheers that erupt in the CIC. I stifle my own relieved cheer and pump my fist at the fireworks display on the screen instead. Whenever we engage the Lankies, I expect them to pull a new trick out of their sleeves because they have done it before more than a few times. It’s a relief to see that our tactics still work even after four years, that our enemy hasn’t adjusted to our new weapons yet.

  “Splash two,” Lieutenant Lawrence shouts into the commotion. “Intercept on Lima-1 and Lima-2.”

  “Good shot,” Colonel Drake says. “Quiet down, everyone. Hold the parade until we have a post-strike assessment from Nashville.”

  We watch the fireworks on the visual feed for a few moments. The fireballs expand and start to dissipate, losing a little of their intense luminescence with every second. If there’s anything left of the seed ships, it’s too small for Nashville’s optics to pick up. Each seed ship just had the kinetic energy of a one-thousand-ton warhead traveling at 1 percent of light speed dumped into it, more than a gigaton released in a fraction of a second. Our species already had an amazing ability to devise ways to kill things, but the threat from the Lankies has pushed our destructive capabilities into a whole new dimension. I wish they could communicate with us, if only to make them appreciate the fact that their attempts to conquer our space has made us far more formidable foes than we were just a decade ago.

  Should have finished us off when you had us on the ropes, I think. Now this won’t end until one of us wipes out the other. We’re just wired that way.

  “Nashville confirms successful intercepts on both targets,” Lieutenant Steadman reports from the tactical station. “Textbook broadside hits, no visible wreckage observed.”

  “Very well,” Colonel Drake replies. “Send our congratulations to Johannesburg and inform them they can now paint a kill mark on the hull. Well done, everyone. Now let’s get into orbit and see what the new management has done to the place since they kicked us out.”

  I’m not used to streaks of good fortune when it comes to dealing with Lankies, but it seems that the day still has some luck in store for us. When we approach Capella Ac a few hours later, the two space control cruisers take point to clear a way through the usual Lanky minefield for our initial scouting run. But when the cruisers have finished their optical survey of the space above the hemisphere, there are far fewer orange mine markers on the tactical display than I had expected. When we started our invasion of Mars, there was a cloud of Lanky proximity mines around the planet, and the Hammerhead cruisers in all the battle groups had to expend all their ammunition to blast gaps into the minefield for the drop ships. The minefield around Capella Ac is more than just patchy in comparison. After two hours of survey, the combined sensor data from both cruisers shows just a few dozen mines in the vicinity, with hundreds of kilometers of empty space between them.

  “Guessing they weren’t expecting visitors anymore after all these years,” Lieutenant Colonel Campbell says when the cruisers have finished their data upload.

  “That’s fine with me. We won’t have to use up half our rail-gun magazines just to get a good look at the surface.”

  “Something else, sir,” Lieutenant Steadman says. “Nashville says that the mines seem to be inert. They flew one of the recon drones past a few of them, and there was no reaction.”

  “Really.” Colonel Drake frowns at the plot, where the observed mines form a very sparse net above the hemisphere. Mapping and clearing mines is one of the main jobs of the Hammerhead cruisers. Their optical sensor suites map each mine and calculate its trajectory for the next few hours. The plot is crisscrossed with dotted orange lines.

  “This is too easy,” Lieutenant Colonel Campbell observes. “If they guard all their colonies like that, we can have them all back by next year.”

  “We haven’t looked at the surface yet. Shooting seed ships out of orbit is just step one. It won’t get us a square meter of ground down there,” Colonel Drake says. He walks back to his chair and sits down, then takes off the helmet of his vacsuit.

  “Tell the cruisers to clear whatever mines they see. I don’t want those things to come close to the battle group, inert or not. Maybe they’re just on standby and slow to wake up. I don’t want to get too used to easy.”

  The colonel looks over to me and nods.

  “Major Grayson, prepare to get a team assembled for a possible field trip. We’re sending out recon flights as soon as the cruisers knock down those mines. Command meeting in the flag briefing room at 1400 hours.”

  “Aye, sir,” I say and disconnect the service line that tethers me to my station. I still have a sense of unease, as if we’re setting ourselves up for an elaborate trap. But right now I am glad for something else to do than look at a hologram and a set of display screens, even if it means preparing for a drop onto a planet that’s most likely lousy with Lanky settlements. I never look forward to battle—no sane grunt ever does—but I had almost forgotten just how invigorating the feeling of anticipating a fight can be. The sense of tension and heightened perception that comes with an impending combat drop makes me feel more alive than anything else. It feels like my entire purpose is focused to a single razor-sharp point in place and time, with no place for uncertainty or ambiguity.

  Maybe that little bastard Masoud was right, I think as I leave the CIC and head down to SOCOM Country to put the STT on alert. Maybe I’m the fucking idiot he thinks I am, and I did miss the war after all.

  CHAPTER 14

  PLANNING A FIELD TRIP

  This time, I make sure to be in the flag briefing room ten minutes early just so I don’t give the XO another reason to dislike me. In another life, back before I learned to put the satisfaction of my ego further down in the stack of my priorities, I would have enjoyed taking up the gauntlet. Now it’s just a minor irritant, not important enough to
justify the expense of energy or brain bandwidth.

  “So far, so good,” Colonel Drake says when we’re all assembled. “We’re still here, and there are two fewer seed ships in the galaxy since we arrived. If I were superstitious, I’d say it’s a good omen for the remainder of the mission.”

  He turns on the viewscreen on the briefing room bulkhead, which changes to show a slice of the tactical plot, all sixteen ships of the task force in loose orbital formation, a fifty-kilometer chain of warships of all sizes. If we had any colonists left alive on Willoughby, they’d probably be ecstatic to see the fleet that just showed up in orbit. But we’re over a decade too late for a rescue mission, so I am genuinely curious to learn why the Fleet was willing to risk two Avengers to pay the place a visit.

  “Situation,” Colonel Drake says. In the harsh light of the briefing room fixtures, I can see that he has faint freckles on the bridge of his nose and his cheekbones, a rarity among capital ship commanders who spend most of their time inside sealed metal hulls. His shipboard uniform is tailored to fit his frame, and it’s obvious that he’s very trim and slender, which is also uncommon among officers of his rank and occupation.

  “The task force is in orbit around a Lanky-occupied colony, Capella Ac, formerly known as Willoughby. We neutralized the enemy orbital garrison six hours ago with Orions, and our cruiser escorts have removed all mines in the neighborhood.”

  “Mission,” the colonel continues. “Our orders are to conduct a reconnaissance in force, and that’s what we will do until we encounter unfavorable odds. Battlespace Control Squadron Fifty-Five and Strike Fighter Squadrons Fifty-One and Fifty-Two have been conducting recon flights of the surface for the last five hours.”

  The colonel switches the display to show a series of low-altitude shots of the surface. The Willoughby I remember was mostly barren mountains and gravel fields, as unfriendly and forbidding as most barely terraformed worlds, years away from being temperate enough to support agriculture. The imagery on the bulkhead screen shows rolling hills overgrown with green-and-blue foliage, an explosion of color that looks nothing like the memory of the place in my head.

  “That’s Willoughby now?” I ask.

  “Affirmative,” Colonel Drake says. “This was taken just three hours ago by one of the birds from BCS-55. The weather down there is a bit of a party. Ceilings at a thousand feet, with fifty-knot gusts. It’ll take a while to get the full picture from that low altitude. We’re going to focus around the area of the colony capital instead of trying to map out the whole planet. We’re still keeping EMCON just in case there are more seed ships somewhere out there in the system. So radar mapping is out of the question for the moment. High-altitude reconnaissance will be limited to thermal imaging. We don’t want to light up an electromagnetic bonfire and draw the bugs to our front porch. Even if we can zap them now.”

  “Any sign of our tall friends yet?” Colonel Rigney asks.

  Colonel Pace, the commander of the space wing, shakes his head.

  “None yet. Two of the recon flights passed over what looked like Lanky settlements, but they didn’t see movement on the ground.”

  “That doesn’t mean they aren’t around,” I say. Even though I am not looking at the XO, I can feel her gaze trying to bore into the side of my head. “As soon as we have boots on the ground, they’ll come out of their holes. Just like they did on Mars.”

  “On the plus side, the visibility under the cloud ceiling isn’t total shit,” Colonel Pace says. “The grunts will have line of sight for half a kilometer or more. And if we have eyes on the ground, we can still vector in air support. The Shrikes can drop blind from inside the soup as long as there’s someone on the deck to designate targets.”

  “What’s our objective here?” Colonel Rigney asks. “If we’re putting boots down, I mean. Are we drawing them out to see how hard they will bite on the bait?”

  Colonel Drake shakes his head.

  “The seed ships were easy. But I don’t want to lose sight of the fact that we are way out on a ledge here. I don’t want to stick out more than we can pull back in a hurry. Just in case the door slams shut on us, and we need to make a fast exit. There’s nothing to be gained from a few hundred dead Lankies on the ground. Not if there are still a few thousand underground. And especially not if it costs us a bunch of casualties and half our ground-attack ordnance.”

  “If we put the regiment on the ground, we’re committed,” Colonel Rigney says.

  “Exactly,” the commander replies. “Say we land the whole SI complement, plus the STT. All the chips on the table. We lure out the Lankies and start mowing them down with exoskeletons and close air support. And they throw everything at us. Like on Mars,” he adds with a glance in my direction.

  “We’d have another fighting withdrawal,” Colonel Rigney says. “A tactical stalemate. And we’d pay in lives and material.”

  “And get nothing in return,” the XO says. “Fact is, we’ll have nothing to show for it even if we wipe them out on the ground. We can hold the planet with a thousand grunts. For a while, anyway. But to what end?”

  “We came to do a recon run,” Colonel Drake says. “Not to plant the flag again and reclaim the whole colony. Just because it was easier than expected to get into orbit doesn’t mean we need to bite off more than we’re ordered to chew on this one.”

  At least he’s not a glory hound, I think with some relief. Over the years, I’ve known enough officers who would have seized the chance to go above and beyond, to plant the NAC flag down there and liberally invest the lives of enlisted troops in an attempt to get into the history books.

  “But I’d hate to have come all this way without something for the intel division to sink their teeth into,” the commander continues. “Let’s make it worth their while. And ours.”

  He turns to the bulkhead display and moves the aerial recon images to one side, then brings up a map and enlarges it to fill most of the screen.

  “This was never a bustling colony,” he says. “The Lankies got here before it could really get off the ground. Not quite two thousand colonists. Just a terraforming network and one major settlement—Willoughby City. For a very flexible definition of ‘city,’ of course.”

  He makes his point by centering the map on the settlement and zooming in to magnify the view. The colony capital is smaller than some military bases I’ve seen. It has maybe a hundred buildings, all lined up on a neat road grid that surrounds a central administration complex. I know that the map doesn’t reflect the current realities on the surface because there’s a terraforming station just a kilometer away from the settlement, and I know that the Lankies destroy those first whenever they take over one of our colony planets. There’s still no firm consensus whether they just hate the electromagnetic radiation the fusion plants emit, or they understand the function of the terraformers—that those large buildings make the atmosphere more suitable for us and less so for them, and that the settlements need the power from those fusion reactors to survive. Either way, I have no doubt that the terraformer on the map has been a shattered ruin for over a decade now, stomped into rubble by the Lankies shortly after they landed.

  The commander brings up another aerial image and puts it next to the map. The computer rotates it and zooms in until the scale of the image matches that of the map exactly. It’s recognizably the same town because the Lankies left most of the buildings alone, but even from a thousand feet up, the deterioration is obvious. I saw this place once from the same vantage point, when Halley did a slow pass over the complex after our dash from the terraforming station to see why Willoughby City wasn’t responding to radio calls. Back then, the streets were strewn with dead colonists, killed by Lanky gas pods like vermin in a basement. The memory is still clear in my brain despite the time that has passed since then, and I feel a very unwelcome sense of déjà vu.

  “That’s a lot of green,” Lieutenant Colonel Campbell says. “Should it be this overgrown already? I thought the colony wasn’
t yet set up for agriculture.”

  “When I saw it last, they barely had grass between those buildings,” I say.

  “No, it shouldn’t be this overgrown,” Colonel Drake replies. “Not from the bit of stuff the colony had growing in their greenhouses. This is whatever the Lankies bring with them when they set up shop.”

  The colony buildings are the standard modular concrete domes, but there’s so much green on them now that they look like they’ve been intentionally camouflaged by a very thorough unit of combat engineers. I remember the mosslike growth I’ve observed on Lanky-occupied worlds, but I’ve never seen this much of it in one spot. It looks like a hundred years have passed since humans last walked around down there. This looks like the network shows my mother liked to watch with me when I was little, science shows about what the world would look like if humans all disappeared and let nature take over. There are no corpses on the roads and walkways between the buildings, just a carpet of green coming up through the perforated concrete slabs of the prefabricated street sections.

  This is how they all ended up, I think. Every settlement on every colony planet we’ve lost to these things. Like the aftermath of a natural disaster.

  “The colony administration building is still standing,” Colonel Drake continues. “It’s a standard Class IV hardened shelter. Reinforced concrete walls one meter thick. If they went into security lockdown, that building was sealed from the inside the moment they noticed they were under attack. As you can see, the Lankies either left it alone or they couldn’t crack the place open. There’s a potential treasure trove of data in the basement, and I want us to go down there and secure it for the intel division back home.”