by Marko Kloos
“I don’t recall that one, sir. Things were a bit hectic, you know, what with the nukes going off in high orbit.”
“Your suit’s computer says you did. You then advised the platoon leader to call down the unit’s drop ship and head back to the carrier, against orders.”
“See those?” I point at the rank sleeves on my uniform, a chevron in a U-shaped border on each shoulder. “That means ‘staff sergeant.’ The platoon leaders had a star on each one. That means ‘second lieutenant.’ Those don’t take orders from staff sergeants.”
The Intel captain looks at me impassively for a moment, like a biologist watching a strange specimen twitch at the end of a needle. Then he puts his data pad onto the desk in front of him, and leans back in his chair.
“You’re a combat controller. You’re the fleet liaison on the ground. Any platoon leader with half a brain will follow your advice. The only reason you’re alive is because you acted against orders, and because your ship’s CAG threatened to shoot nukes at a task force ship. That’s good enough for a court-martial for everyone above the rank of corporal on those four drop ships, as far as I’m concerned.”
I look at the captain in disbelief for a moment. Then some gasket in my brain gives way.
“Are you seriously taking us to task for getting off that rock alive? You have got to be joking.”
“That’s absolutely not the case, Sergeant. I don’t have an issue with the fact that you survived. I just have an issue with the fact that you acted against orders.”
“Fuck you,” I say, and fold my arms across my chest. “I’m done talking to you. Get me JAG counsel in here or get out of my face.”
“You don’t need legal counsel. You’re not charged with anything yet.”
“Then either charge me and have the MP haul me off to the brig, or stop wasting my fucking time.”
The captain picks up his data pad again and taps the screen studiously. I have to suppress the urge to reach across the desk and rip the damn thing from his hands. Right now, they’re looking for a way to pin the tail on the donkey, to find someone to take the heat, to make it look like the brass aren’t the collection of ticket-punching career desk pilots they’ve always been. We’re losing the war for the survival of our species, and the people in charge are still willing to throw the grunts out of the airlock to save their own careers.
“You’re a fleet asset, Staff Sergeant Grayson. We don’t have enough combat controllers to let you spend a month or two in Leavenworth while the corps decides whether to throw the book at you. Rest assured, however, that the incident will go on your record, and that we’ll revisit the issue once things have settled a bit.”
I shake my head and chuckle.
“We just got our asses kicked by the Lankies, seven light years from this place. The way things are going for the home team, I’m not too worried about a fucking court-martial right now, Captain.”
The fleet has an informal term for sailors who survive the destruction of their ship: HLOs, hull-loss orphans. “Halos” usually get shifted from one Transient Personnel Unit to another as the fleet tries to find a new home for them. Those of us who survived the disaster of Sirius Ad aren’t treated like halos, even though we are. Instead, they treat us with a combination of movement restrictions and benign neglect that makes us feel only marginally more welcome than SRA prisoners of war. We’re not allowed onto MilNet, and we’re berthed in a restricted area of Independence Station, with a screen of military police guards keeping us away from the other troopers and sailors passing through the place. The week after our arrival sees an ever-increasing stream of personnel and gear, until Independence looks like a slightly cleaner and newer version of the perennially overcrowded Gateway Station. I’ve been in the fleet long enough to know that our comms blackout means that the brass don’t want the news of our ass-kicking to get out among the rank and file just yet. The meaning of the swelling troop buildup in one of the NAC’s three major orbital hubs is pretty clear—we’re gearing up for a major operation, and Command is throwing everything but the kitchen sink at the Lankies this time.
Finally, after a week and a half of more debriefings, extended naps, medical checkups, and long stretches of mind-numbing boredom, the fleet has figured out what to do with me.
“Staff Sergeant Grayson,” the lieutenant says as he walks into the storage room that serves as our temporary mess hall. I put down my ham-and-cheese sandwich and get up to render a salute.
“As you were, Sergeant,” he says, and sits down across the table from me. He is wearing the standard black fleet beret, and his specialty badge marks him as a Logistics & Personnel pencil pusher, not an Intel officer like all the other brass I’ve seen this week.
“Yes, sir,” I say, and push aside my sandwich. “What’s the word?”
“Vacation’s over. The fleet needs you to jump back in, if you’re ready.”
“Of course, sir.”
He produces a data pad, taps around on the screen, and then turns it so I can see the display.
“You’ll be reporting to NACS Midway at 1300 Zulu tomorrow. She’s on her way to Independence Station right now.”
“The Midway?” I search my mental data bank for information. “Didn’t they decommission her a few years back?”
“She was put in reserve. They bumped her back into the active fleet last week. The maintenance crew is ferrying her over from the strategic-reserve fleetyard.”
“Wow,” I say. “Fleet’s scraping the bottom of the barrel. The Pacific-class ships are eighty fucking years old by now. I thought they were all scrapped already.”
“All but Midway and Iwo Jima,” the lieutenant says. He puts away his data pad and gets up from his chair. “Fleet’s short on hulls, Sarge. The Pacifics are old, but they’re big hulls. Good luck in your new assignment.”
“What about my gear? My bug suit burned up with the Manitoba, along with all my other stuff.”
“Ask the supply guy in charge on the Midway. They’ll reissue everything, I’m sure.”
When they fitted me for my bug suit, I had to come to the fleet’s Special Warfare Center on Luna to get fitted, and the process took three days of adjustments and a week of field testing. I know without the trace of a doubt that the supply monkeys on that scrapyard candidate won’t have a new bug suit in storage. I know I’ll be sent into battle against the Lankies without proper armor, on a ship that got a last-minute reprieve from its date with the scrapyard’s plasma torches. But the personnel clerk in front of me doesn’t care about any of that, nor would he have the clout to do anything about it if he did, so I just salute and watch him walk out of the storage room.
As a civvie station, Independence has some luxuries that austere Gateway can’t match. Many of the public areas have viewports that offer a good vista of Earth through multiple layers of inch-thick polycarb panes. On Gateway, you can look at Earth through external camera feeds, but nothing can match seeing the planet with your own eyes. There’s a small lounge in our restricted area, and I spend much of my remaining idle time until Midway’s arrival sitting there, watching the orbital traffic and the swirling weather patterns in the atmosphere below. Somewhere down there, beneath the cloud cover, Mom is going about her business in PRC Boston-7, warming up her BNA ration while watching Network shows. Luna is on the far side of the station, out of my field of view, but I know that Halley is in a classroom or a drop-ship cockpit right now, teaching the next batch of space bus drivers how to fly a Wasp. The only two people I care about are closer to me than they’ve been for most of my half-decade career, and my travel and comms restrictions mean that they might as well be sixty light years and half a dozen Alcubierre hops away.
For the first time in my life in the service, I don’t want to leave Earth.
CHAPTER 13
The Midway is a relic, a loose confederation of parts flying in vaguely carrier-shaped formation. When I arrive at my new duty station, there are still swarms of civilian fleet yard techs everywhe
re, hammering the ancient carrier back into fighting condition. Everywhere I look, there’s evidence that the Midway had a long and rough life in the fleet, and that she didn’t get the benefit of a final overhaul before being mothballed. The lining on the deck floors is shot, the paint on the bulkheads is old and faded, and the whole ship smells like a long-disused storage locker. I look around for some redeeming feature, but after a few hours on board, the best thing I can say about the old warhorse is that her hull still seems to be mostly airtight.
“I know what you’re thinking,” my new commanding officer says. His name tag says MICHAELSON. He’s a captain, not a major like all my other COs. The special-operations company on a carrier is usually headed by a staff-officer rank, but the fleet seems to be running out of even those.
“I’m not getting paid to think, sir,” I tell him. “That’s for the ranks with the stars on the shoulder boards.”
I take stock of the cloth badges on the captain’s fatigues. I’ve never met him in the fleet, but he looks vaguely familiar, and he has the proper credentials—SEAL badge, drop wings in gold, all the right specialty tabs, and a SpecWar badge on the black beret tucked underneath his shoulder board. The fact that he’s in battle dress instead of Class A rags is somehow comforting.
“Yes, I’m active duty,” he says when he notices my glance at his patches. “I’m the new CO of the SpecWar company on the Midway. Such as it is.”
“If you don’t mind me saying, sir, I’m surprised they assigned a full company of podheads to this tub.”
He gives me a curt smile and folds his hands across his chest.
“Me, too, Sergeant. In any case, we’re only a full company on paper right now. You and I are it at the moment, until the rest trickles in. I’m supposed to get two SI recon platoons, two Spaceborne Rescue guys, and a team of SEALs.”
“How many more combat controllers, sir?”
“They promised me two more, but so far, you’re your own team.”
“I’ll need all new gear, sir. My junk burned up with the carrier we lost at Sirius Ad. Bug suit, uniforms, everything.”
“Sirius Ad?” the captain repeats, and leans forward with sudden interest in his eyes. “Holy shit. You were one of the ones who got out of there?”
“Yes, sir. Me and about a hundred mudlegs from SI. Four drop ships’ full.”
“They just put the news on MilNet three days ago, just before all the movement orders got canceled. It seems they’re reshuffling the whole damn fleet. I was Earthside for an instructor tour at Coronado. Hadn’t even sorted my shit into the locker when my new orders came through. So much for six months on Earth.” He leans back in his chair and puts his feet on the desk. His boots are well worn, but spotless. “You are one lucky son of a bitch, Sergeant. If I end up going dirtside on this deployment, I’m going to stay close to you.”
“I wouldn’t, sir,” I reply with a smile. “I’ve used up all my luck last week. Things go to shit, I’ll probably be the first to buy it.”
He rasps a laugh.
“Go find your berth and get settled, Sergeant. We’ll have a company powwow once the rest of the crew gets in. I’d direct you to the supply group, but I just got here myself, and I’ve never been on a Pacific-class before. Just ask one of the yard monkeys.”
The Midway is a relic, but her berthing spaces are roomy. I have nothing to put away, since all I have with me is the uniform set I borrowed from the supply sergeant on the Nassau, so claiming my berth is just a matter of walking in and punching my name and rank into the security panel at the hatch.
When I finally locate the Midway’s supply-and-logistics group, the sergeant sitting behind the clothes- and kit-issue counter looks familiar. We both look at each other in dawning recognition, and then the supply sergeant snaps his fingers and points at me.
“Fleet School,” he says. “You were in my platoon. Grayson, right?”
I read his name tag, and my brain finally sorts him into the right spot.
“Simer. You were at the other end of the platoon bay. How have you been?”
“Oh, you know,” he says, and shakes my hand. He looks a bit soft around the edges, evidence of a career mostly spent sitting at a desk or folding laundry. “Ship-hopping every six months, just like everyone else. Although I have no clue what I fucked up to get posted to this bucket. What can I do for you?”
“I lost all my kit when my last ship went down,” I say. “I need the basic set again, the whole sheet.”
“I’ll see what we have in the back. What’s your MOS?”
“One Charlie Two Five One.”
“Combat controller? Holy crap. I thought you were off to Neural Networks School after Great Lakes.”
“I was. It’s a long story. I sort of switched tracks along the way.”
“Yeah, I guess you did.” He picks up a data pad and consults the screen. “Truth be told, I don’t know half the shit I have right now. Things have been a bit nuts. They’re all trying to do three weeks of pre-deployment work in three days.”
He flicks through a few screens on his pad.
“You guys have a ton of specialized shit I’ve never even seen. I have all the standard gear for sure, but I don’t have any HEBAs. They don’t issue those in the regular supply chain.”
“Yeah, they fit those at the issue point.”
“I’ll put a request into the system anyway. Maybe they’ll get one ready for you Earthside before we leave Gateway.”
“Any idea where we’re going? I haven’t heard anything from the brass yet.”
“They’re all mum about it. But I will tell you one thing.” Sergeant Simer looks around, and then leans toward me and lowers his voice. “There’s some weird shit going on. I see the stuff popping up in the supply logs, and I’ve never seen that kind of pre-dep loadout.”
“Like what?”
“Well, for starters, we got three times as much food as we need for a six-month cruise. And they’re filling all the missile tubes with nukes. I’ve never seen so many nuke supply codes come through the system at once. Someone upstairs must have cracked open a big-ass warehouse full of megatons.”
I grimace at this revelation. The fleet only goes heavy on nukes when we go up against the Lankies, and just a week after Sirius Ad, I don’t want to go near Lanky-controlled space again already, especially not with all my good gear missing.
“Food stockpiles, nukes in the tubes…sounds like we’re in for a shit sandwich.”
“Maybe we’ve found the Lanky homeworld,” Sergeant Simer offers. “Maybe we’re headed downtown into Lanky Central.”
“You better hope we’re not,” I say, and shudder at the thought of transitioning into a system crawling with Lanky ships. I remember the sight of the solitary seed ship, taking on our entire carrier task force without getting its hull scratched. Just one of their ships wiped out 5 percent of our entire fleet in less than forty-five minutes, including three of our biggest and newest warships. A dozen of them could probably go through our whole fleet like a fléchette through a block of soy chicken.
We’re about to run our heads against the same unyielding barrier, and once again, the brass seem to have concluded that our approach isn’t working because we’re not running at the wall fast enough.
As big as the Midway is, the fleet manages to fill it up with people and gear quickly. Two days after my arrival, the supply crews have filled every storage room on the ship to the ceiling, and navigating the fore-and-aft gangways and corridors becomes an exercise in weaving between pallets and gear pods stacked along the walls. Even the carrier’s flight deck, the only open space on the ship big enough for running, resembles an overstuffed storage shed at a maintenance depot.
“They’ll turn this boat into a supercarrier by weight if they don’t stop stacking shit on every flat surface,” Captain Michaelson says as we observe the hustle and bustle on the flight deck on the third morning of the Midway’s hurried deployment preparation. We came down to the flight deck to get
in a few miles before breakfast, but I doubt that even the most efficient ballistics computer in the fleet could plot a clean course through the mess in front of us. There’s a flight of drop ships parked over to one side of the deck, like a quartet of barely tolerated guests, and the rest of the flight deck is a sea of cargo containers, munitions pallets, and fuel bladders.
“Those drop ships are ancient,” I say, and point at the cluster of olive-green spacecraft. “Wasp-A. You don’t even see those in the fleet anymore. I thought they had all been upgraded or junked by now.”
“I’ll bet you anything all this gear is from the strategic-reserve stockpile. Looks like it’s all or nothing.”
At the far end of the flight deck, some supply crews are erecting what look like SI field tents. Several neat rows of them are already standing, and from the number of tents laid out on the deck beyond, it looks like the supply guys are putting together a tent village big enough to quarter an entire regiment of Spaceborne Infantry in full kit.
When I see Sergeant Simer walking nearby, a data pad in his hand and a harried look on his face, I wave at him to flag him down.
“Hey, Simer,” I say. “What’s up with Tent City back there? Are we picking up refugees?”
“Fucked if I know,” Simer shrugs. “They said to get ’em up before we deploy. Rumor has it we’ll get a bunch more passengers along for the ride. As if we don’t have this thing loaded up to the gunwales already.”
“Any guess on where?” the captain asks me when Simer walks off again.
“Nukes in the tubes, enough tents for a regiment on the deck, and everyone’s in a rush,” I say. “I hope the brass have their priorities straight, and we’re going back to Sirius Ad to kick some Lanky ass.”
“That would be good and proper,” Captain Michaelson agrees.
And that’s how I know we’re going somewhere else, I think.
