Orders of Battle (Frontlines)

by Marko Kloos

  “I’ve been in some pretty bad neighborhoods,” she says.

  “A PRC has nothing on this,” I reply. “Trust me. Lots of tough kids from the PRCs in the infantry. And they all shit their pants when they see their first Lanky stomping toward them on the field. It’s not an experience you can get from a simulator.”

  “I appreciate the warnings,” Elin says. “But I still want to come along. I’ll have to trust you and the grunts to keep me out of trouble. I’ll deal with the emotional fallout later if it comes to that. But I’d always regret it if I chickened out after coming all this way.”

  I try to think of another argument to put in front of her to dissuade her, but I can tell by the way her jawline has set that she has made up her mind. I shrug and shake my head.

  “I gave you the fine print. And you’re a grown-up professional. If I can’t scare you off, you have my go-ahead to come along.”

  She does a little fist pump and exhales for effect.

  “Thank you. I’ll be a good passenger. And you may find it weird or insane, but part of me hopes that I’ll get to see a live Lanky down there.”

  “Hope that you don’t get your wish,” I say. “And I want you no further than twenty meters from me at all times. And when I tell you to make a run for the drop ship, you drop everything and run.”

  Elin smirks.

  “I run marathons,” she says. “And I used to run track in college. If we have to make a dash for the drop ship, I can guarantee you that I’ll be the first one up the ramp. I’m curious, Major. But I am not a moron.”

  CHAPTER 16

  ONE HELL OF A WAY TO MAKE

  A LIVING

  There’s a ritual to combat drops, and it’s always the same.

  You put your armor on and call out every action as you do—“latch breastplate top left, latch breastplate bottom left, lock left pauldron rear, attach left pauldron front”—because it reduces errors when the action is brought to the conscious mind instead of letting the hands do their thing on autopilot. You button up, let someone else triple-check your seals, and triple-check theirs for them. Then you pick up your weapon and ammunition, fill your magazine pouches, and let the rifle do its calibration handshake with your armor’s computer. Everything has a rhythm to it, and the never-changing routine of the act puts the mind into battle mode. But the final step of the ritual is the walk to the drop ship, and that’s when my brain truly focuses itself on that single point in time and space. For me, it’s the visual and aural change—walking across the cavernous, perpetually busy hangar toward the waiting tail ramp of the drop ship, and stepping into a confined space that turns almost dead quiet when the ramp goes up and seals itself against the hull.

  We’re in a Dragonfly today because we don’t need the capabilities of the far more valuable Blackflies. The cargo deck can hold forty troopers in full kit, or sixty if they squeeze in tightly. The team going down to the surface is only eighteen people strong, and we have a lot of seats to spare on this drop. The crew chief has us close to the forward bulkhead in two rows along the sides of the hull. On the floor between our seat rows, the cargo kit attachments are flush with the floor and tucked out of the way, unnecessary because we’re not taking freight or heavy gear with us. Sixteen SEALs, the Fleet’s elite space-air-land commandos, sit in their jump seats, weapons in their holding brackets between the backrests, all strapped in already when I walk up the ramp with Dr. Elin Vandenberg in tow. The SEALs and I are all in bug suits, and the xenobiologist is sticking out in her hostile environment kit, a white engineering vacsuit without any armor or military hardware.

  “I’ll keep the passenger next to me,” I tell the crew chief who comes over to help us with strapping in, and he nods. It throws off the symmetry of the seating arrangement, but Elin weighs half of what any of the SEALs do in their armor, and I want her close by in case we need to unbuckle quickly in an emergency. Combat drops in the back of a drop ship are an unnerving affair even when you’ve done them a thousand times. For civilians or shore-based personnel like Dr. Vandenberg, they’re probably ten times as stressful. Drop ships have no windows for reference, so the passengers in the back have to do the whole flight blindly, and that circumstance combined with the knowledge that danger is waiting at the end of the ride gives the brain all kinds of opportunities to indulge in speculation. When you have no idea what is going on outside of the hull, every noise becomes a system failure, and every bump becomes an imminent crash in your mind. It’s my least favorite part of any mission because I have no control over what happens until we are on the ground.

  “You good?” I ask the xenobiologist over helmet-to-helmet comms when the crew chief has strapped her in and tightened her harness.

  She gives me a thumbs-up and a gamely smile, but I can tell by the shade of her face behind her transparent visor that she’s probably having second thoughts already about committing to this ride-along.

  “Have you done a drop before?” I ask to keep her mind a little busy with something other than interpreting strange noises and sensations.

  “Ferry flights,” she says. “Down to Arcadia. And the atmospheric birds in training, years ago. But never a drop into a hot landing zone.”

  “Do four more after this one, and you qualify for combat drop wings,” I say.

  “How many have you done?”

  “Including atmospheric patrols on Mars where I didn’t leave the ship? About six hundred or so. Only counting the ones where we had skids on the ground, probably three fifty.”

  “Good god,” Elin says. “You’ve done this six hundred times?”

  “Give or take a few.”

  “That is one hell of a way to make a living.”

  “I can’t really disagree there,” I say.

  A slight vibration goes through the ship, and Elin looks around to figure out the source.

  “Docking clamp,” I say. “Latches on to the receptacle on the top.”

  “Rapier Three-One is in the clamp and ready for launch. Payload team leader, give me a go/no-go for launch,” the drop ship’s pilot sends from the flight deck.

  “Last chance to get off this elevator,” I say to Dr. Vandenberg. She just shakes her head, her mouth a thin horizontal line behind the thick polyplast of her face shield.

  “Three-One, payload team leader. We are go for launch back here,” I send to the flight deck, and I give a thumbs-up to the crew chief sitting by the bulkhead next to the flight deck passageway. He returns the gesture and speaks into his own helmet headset. A few moments later, another rumbling vibration goes through the hull, and I feel the familiar sensation of the drop ship leaving the flight deck surface as the docking clamp hoists it up for transfer to the drop hatch.

  “Dagger team, Dagger Actual. Give me a comms check, please,” I send to the SEALs. “Sound off.”

  “Dagger One-Niner, check.”

  “Dagger One-One, check.”

  “Dagger One-Two . . .”

  One by one, the SEAL team members send their acknowledgments. The radio check is a time-honored tradition from the days of flaky signals and fragile wireless equipment. I would know instantly if any of my team members dropped out of the comms link because my suit’s computer would alert me right away, but the sound-off is a part of the combat drop ritual as well, so nobody ever skips it for expediency. It’s a nerve balm of sorts, but by this point I suspect that it has also seeped into the realm of superstition where the troops would think it bad luck to deviate from the routine. We can travel between star systems and harness the power of the sun in our spaceships, but we’re still worried about pissing off the fates if we skip the proper supplications.

  The new docking arms on Washington’s flight deck are remarkably smooth and efficient, much easier on passengers than the abrupt and jerky ones on the old assault carriers, but I can still tell from experience when we’re about to lock into the drop hatch. A few moments after the familiar sinking feeling in my stomach sets in, the drop ship stops with a little shudder of
the hull, and I know that we are now down “in the pit,” with nothing between us and empty space except for the armored outer hatch door.

  “This is the worst part,” I say to Dr. Vandenberg. “When we drop, there’s a second or two of free fall until we leave the artificial gravity field. It can be a little weird if you’re not used to it. But it’s over before you know it.”

  “Thanks for the warning,” Elin says. She closes her eyes and puts her head back against the headrest of her seat.

  Some pilots give a courtesy warning before they hit the release button for the clamp. Others don’t bother to keep the passengers in the loop about procedure, and our pilot today is one of those. Every time the clamp releases and I feel the drop, I can’t help but think of an execution scaffold, the floor dropping underneath the condemned without a warning. For a second and a half, sixty tons of armored war machine are in free fall as we drop out of the belly of the carrier and into the darkness of space. Then the feeling in the pit of my stomach dissipates. The engines of the drop ship go from idle to full thrust, and we are on our way to the surface of the Lanky planet formerly known as the human colony Willoughby.

  “Why don’t we have armor for this sort of thing?” Elin asks against the rumbling of the hull as the drop ship slices through the atmosphere. I’m glad for her that she can’t see the light show I know is taking place on the other side of the titanium skin, where the superheated plasma from the friction of our descent is making us look like a shooting star.

  “We do have armor,” I say and tap on the hard shell of my bug suit’s breastplate. “Won’t keep a Lanky from squishing me, though. There isn’t anything you can wrap around a trooper to be Lanky-proof.”

  “I mean armored vehicles,” she says. “It’s weird that we’d come all this way in these sophisticated machines and then just send a bunch of people with rifles to do the work. It seems like it would be good to have wheels for driving away quickly. And a big gun on top for shooting all the stuff you can’t drive away from.”

  “Mules,” I say. “The SI has them. They weigh twenty tons, and you can fit only one into a drop ship. And the places we go, most of the time we have to disembark anyway and do the job on foot. The mules can’t go into Lanky holes or up steep rocky inclines. They need lots of fuel and power cells. And you need an entire drop-ship wing to transport enough mules for a single company. You can get four times as many grunts on the ground without the armor. And if we need more mobility, we already have drop ships. Those cover way more ground anyway. The new PACS are better than anything on wheels. For what we do, anyway. But those take up space, too. Four per drop ship, versus forty troopers.”

  “I see,” she says. “You’ve probably figured out by now that infantry combat is not my department.”

  The drop ship gets jolted roughly, and Elin grabs the side of her jump seat briefly.

  “This is like the worst roller coaster ride ever,” she says. “I hate roller coasters, by the way.”

  “Didn’t they give you combat training with that commission?” I say to keep the conversation going and distract her from the bouncy ride.

  “I haven’t fired a rifle since Basic Training,” she says. “We qualify with sidearms once a year. Fifty rounds. I don’t know why they even bother. It’s not like a Lanky would even feel those.”

  “Last-ditch defiance. It’s basically a magazine full of fuck-yous,” I say, and she laughs.

  “Ten minutes to drop zone,” the pilot sends from the flight deck. “It’s going to be choppy all the way down, so don’t nobody get up to go to the bathroom.”

  “Copy ten minutes to LZ,” I send back. Then I switch to my all-platoon channel to address the SEAL team.

  “Ten minutes to go-time,” I say. “Final gear checks and briefing now, people.”

  I bring up a tactical map of the target area on my helmet’s heads-up display and send it to the entire team.

  “Deployment as discussed in the initial briefing,” I say. “We put down on this plaza a hundred meters north of the admin center. Proceed south on the main boulevard until we reach the building. Dagger Two and Dagger Four will take up overwatch positions on the northeast and southwest corners.”

  I mark up the map as I go through the steps we rehearsed in the pre-mission briefing. Everyone knows their jobs and places, but this, too, is part of the ritual, and it serves to focus everyone on what’s about to happen.

  “Dagger One and Dagger Three will breach the admin building at the main entrance vestibules. The access panels run off solar, so they should still have juice to let us punch in the master code. If the panels are dead, we’ll breach with shaped charges. We make entry, and I’ll take Dagger One down to the network operations center. Secure the data modules, exfil, return to the pickup point, and call down the ship for dustoff. Any questions?”

  “Rules of engagement for the overwatch squads,” Lieutenant Philips says. He’s the leader of Third Squad, designated Dagger Two for this mission. “If we have company showing up halfway through, how close do we let them get before we light them up?”

  “We’ll play it by ear,” I reply. “Depends on the line of sight we have once we are on the ground. If they’re headed your way and you can drop them, it’s up to you. If they’re too close or too many, we retreat to the admin center and let close air support take care of it.”

  The team members all send back their acknowledgments. I check the vitals overview on my screen for the fiftieth time on this descent. Comms green, weapons green, biometrics green. I have a team of the best special operations troops in the Corps, and they’re all ready to be let off the leash for a little bit.

  “Hand signals for comms whenever possible,” I caution. “Keep our EM noise to the bare minimum. And no explosives if we can go in soft at all. No need to stir the neighborhood more than necessary.”

  Another round of acknowledgment marks shows up on my screen next to the list of team member names.

  “One last word to the wise,” I say. “For all those who haven’t been up against these things on the ground yet. They move like they’re half-asleep, but they’re much faster than they look. Don’t get tunnel vision, or you’re in deep shit before you know it. Do not go out of your way to put rounds on target just because you have one in your sights. We get nothing out of killing a few Lankies. There will still be hundreds or thousands of them. Not even a dozen dead ones are worth trading a single one of us.”

  The ship gets buffeted again, hard enough to feel like we’re shifting sideways in the air by a meter or two. Outside, it’s noisy now because we have air on the other side of the hull, and I can hear rain lashing the titanium-alloy skin of the Dragonfly. Next to me, Elin Vandenberg looks like she is trying to disappear in the depths of her vacuum suit.

  In the atmosphere nearby, a thunderclap goes off like a proximity-fused artillery shell. The ship lurches, then rights itself. On most descents, I like to tap into the eternal sensor feeds to see what’s ahead of us. This time, I elect to remain blissfully unaware. Until the skids of the Dragonfly hit the dirt, our fate is entirely in the pilot’s hands, and there’s nothing I can do from the cargo compartment even if I see trouble coming our way.

  Going out to tap-dance on a ledge in the middle of a storm again, I think. Outside, thunder rolls once more, as if to underline my thoughts.

  “Thirty seconds to drop zone,” the flight deck announces. “Advise against unbuckling before the green light. Lots of wind shear down here.”

  “Copy that,” I say. “We’ll stay put until the skids are down.”

  I look over the two rows of SEALs, all appearing identical in their bug suits except for the rank and name markers on the chest plates.

  “Thirty seconds to go-time. Dagger team, lock and load.”

  The SEALs in the hold all take their weapons out of the transport mounts and insert magazines, then they place the rifles upright between their feet. Dr. Vandenberg watches me as I follow suit.

  “We’re staying str
apped in until we land because of the weather,” I tell her. “When the ramp goes down, I’ll be the first one out. You’ll be right with me. Remember what I said about staying within twenty meters. I don’t want to have to look for you down there if things go to shit.”

  She gives me a tight-lipped nod.

  A combat descent is always a wild ride, but this one is wilder than most. The ship seems to slide and pitch along every axis as we come in over the landing zone. By the time I feel the impact of the skids with the ground, I am looking forward to getting off the drop ship more than I fear whatever is on the other side of that tail ramp.

  The light above the ramp switches from red to green. A second later, the ramp starts to lower itself. As soon as there’s a gap in the hull, a gust of wind blows into the cargo hold, bringing droplets of rain with it. I hit the quick-release button on my harness and reach over to do the same for Elin Vandenberg.

  “Dagger team, on your feet,” I shout.

  The ramp hits the ground, and I pick up my rifle and lead the way. Behind me, the SEALs line up in two rows as they file out. As we come down the ramp, they jump off the sides and assume their guard positions.

  The weather outside is a mess. The steel-gray clouds hang low in the sky, and the rain is driving across my field of view in horizontal bands that whip against the sides of the colony buildings in sight.

  “Five hundred meters’ line of sight, my ass,” I mutter. The ground beneath my feet is concrete, but it’s slick with water and whatever plant life has attached itself to the man-made material and pushed up through the cracks and gaps over the years. My armored boots splash into ankle-deep puddles as I step off the ramp and onto the surface of Willoughby.

  At my back, the last of the SEALs hop off the ramp, and they rush off to the sides to assume their overwatch guard positions, rifles at the ready. I signal the crew chief that the ramp is clear, and he slaps the switch for the ramp control. A moment later, the pitch of the drop ship’s engines increases, and the Dragonfly hauls itself off the ground again. I watch as it disappears into the clouds above, which doesn’t take very long. It really looks like I could stand on the roof of the admin center and jump up to reach the bottom of the cloud ceiling.