by Marko Kloos
BY MARKO KLOOS
Frontlines
Terms of Enlistment
Lines of Departure
Angles of Attack
Chains of Command
Measures of Absolution (A Frontlines Kindle novella)
“Lucky Thirteen” (A Frontlines Kindle short story)
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2017 by Marko Kloos
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by 47North, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and 47North are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503940710
ISBN-10: 1503940713
Cover design by Megan Haggerty
Cover illustrated by Maciej Rebisz
For all those who have stood the watch in places where others fear to tread.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1 RUN, INTERRUPTED
CHAPTER 2 JOINT BASE THULE
CHAPTER 3 HUNTING A BEAR IN WINTER
CHAPTER 4 UNDER THE ICE
CHAPTER 5 UNFRIENDLY TRAFFIC
CHAPTER 6 BANGED UP
CHAPTER 7 ’BURBER THEME PARK
CHAPTER 8 FINAL DAYS
CHAPTER 9 GETTING THE BAND BACK TOGETHER
CHAPTER 10 FLEET ASSEMBLY POINT ECHO
CHAPTER 11 PHASE ONE
CHAPTER 12 KICKING THE DOOR OFF THE HINGES
CHAPTER 13 PODS AWAY
CHAPTER 14 RED BEACH
CHAPTER 15 RODS FROM THE GODS
CHAPTER 16 TUTTLE 250
CHAPTER 17 DANGEROUS GROUND
CHAPTER 18 RED HAT EXPRESS
CHAPTER 19 47 NORTHING
CHAPTER 20 NO SUCH THING AS OVERKILL
CHAPTER 21 GETTING OFF THE BEACH AT HIGH TIDE
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHAPTER 1
RUN, INTERRUPTED
The Lanky in my gun sights is gigantic, far bigger than any I’ve ever seen before. It fills the optic of my M-90’s sight completely, even at zero magnification and even though I am still a few hundred meters away. It walks toward me unhurriedly, with slow steps that sound like artillery rounds exploding on the red soil. With every step, the Lanky’s three-toed feet send up clouds of dust.
I aim the targeting reticle at the center of the Lanky’s chest and squeeze the trigger, but it feels like the pull weight of it has increased a hundredfold. I press with all the force my finger can muster, but it moves backward with agonizing slowness. The Lanky in front of me, a hundred meters tall at least, takes another step that cuts the distance between us in half. Finally, the trigger on my M-90 clicks past the release point, and the shot breaks. Instead of the thundering boom and heavy recoil of my rifle’s anti-Lanky rounds, the shot sounds muffled and feeble, and the rifle barely moves against my shoulder. The warhead flies out and hits the Lanky somewhere in the vast expanse of its upper torso, but I know the round is ineffective even before I see the little puff of the impact. I cycle the rifle’s bolt manually to feed a new round and fire again, even though it’s futile. I empty the magazine, one feeble round after the other. The Lanky doesn’t seem to notice them. It’s like I’m throwing pebbles against a mountainside.
Then the Lanky is right in front of me, towering into the gray sky, its wide cranial shield swinging from left to right as the creature turns its head. It swings one of its spindly arms and swats me aside casually and without effort. The world tumbles wildly in my helmet display as I am flung violently backwards.
I know this isn’t reality because when I slam into the rock a few hundred meters away, the impact should have killed me instantly, crushed me like a bug on the polyplast windshield of a hydrobus, battle armor or not. Instead, I slide to the ground, fully awake and aware, and I feel no pain at all. My right hand still holds part of my rifle, but most of it is shattered. I throw away the piece of the gun I’m still holding and get to my feet.
The Lanky pays no further attention to me. It walks off to my left with huge, slow steps. As big as it is, it’s moving away so fast that an ATV at full throttle would have a hard time catching up, even though the creature isn’t moving in a particular rush. Following an urge, I run after the Lanky, not knowing what exactly I’ll do to stop it once I catch up to it.
The Lanky walks away from me with long, thundering strides. In front of me, the rocky ridge I’m standing on slopes down and leads into a wide valley. The sky is the color of dirty steel, the soil the pale ochre of Mars dirt. I come to a stop at the edge of the ridge and take in the scenery below with astonishment. The Lanky, already a kilometer away, is striding toward a town, which is the inadequate name we gave to their settlement structures. The Lanky “towns” are vast, interconnected latticework edifices that look a lot like coral reefs, impossibly fragile looking for something built by such enormous beings. In front of me, the entire valley is filled with Lanky structures. They cover the Martian soil for square kilometer after square kilometer, as far as my helmet optics can see. In the open spaces between the hundreds—thousands—of Lanky shelters, I can see Lankies moving around, alone and in groups, many hundreds of them, more than I’ve ever seen together.
The Lanky that swept me aside continues down the slope toward the cluster of Lanky buildings. Halfway down the incline, it stops and turns around. The massive head swivels in my direction until it appears that the Lanky is looking right at me. We regard each other for a long moment. Then the creature lets out a wail that is deafening even from over a kilometer away. I’ve heard that wail, or versions of it, on the battlefield and in my dreams hundreds of times, and it’s unsettling every time, as if it triggers some sort of instinctive response in the primitive parts of our human brains, the bits that make us scared when we’re alone in the dark without a light nearby. The wail rolls over the landscape like an aural tsunami, washing over me and reverberating from the hillside behind me until it sounds like it comes from every direction at once. It goes on for what seems like a minute, then fades slowly and ends on a single note that sounds mournful, like a funeral dirge.
Down in the valley, the other Lankies take up the call and reply with their own alien voices, first hundreds and then thousands, maybe tens of thousands. I can feel their calls through the ground and the soles of my boots, and in the air all around, as if every air molecule in the atmosphere is moved by the sonic energy of this overwhelming alien chorus. It seems that everyone on this planet should be able to hear this cacophony, which sounds weirdly harmonious despite being made up of tens of thousands of discordant voices. The chorus goes on for a long time before it dies down slowly, one voice at a time.
The silence that follows is ominous and far more unnatural to my ears than what came before. I look up to the skies, dark gray and empty, and feel a slowly swelling dread seizing my heart. Then there’s a new sound, faint in the wind but undeniably present and growing with every second, a sharp slicing sound that’s just short of a whistle. Just like Lanky calls, I’ve heard this noise in the atmosphere before, and I know what it portends. I wasn’t afraid when the Lanky slammed me aside on his way past me, or when tens of thousands of them started their unearthly wailing, but I am afraid now, scared to death of what I know is coming down th
rough the atmosphere. I don’t see the warheads, but I can feel their malevolent presence in the air and in my bones. The end of the world is coming, and there’s nothing that can stop it, no shelter deep enough to hide in, no creature tall and strong enough to survive what is about to come.
In the last few moments before the detonation, there’s a ripping sound in the air, small and dense objects displacing air as they streak toward the ground at hypersonic speed. Then the valley in front of me, all the Lankies and their elaborate latticework structures, disappears in a brilliantly, blindingly white flash, a new sun rising into existence right here in front of me on the surface of this planet. I feel the searing heat radiate out from the explosion instantly, and it’s like standing right in front of the thrust nozzles of a fusion rocket. I should be incinerated already, reduced to my component atoms in a nanosecond, but my body holds together as the flash and heat from the nuclear explosion wash over me. I stay in one piece long enough for the sound and the shock wave of the multi-megaton nuclear burst to reach me up here on the plateau. It’s impossibly loud, a world-ending crash, sound with so much physical force behind it that it might as well be a solid. But I can still hear and see, still feel the heart thundering in my chest, even as the shock wave lifts me off the ground, squeezes the air out of my lungs, and flings me into the air. I hit something solid with my head, and the sudden and unexpected sensation floods through me and yanks me out of the dream.
I wake up on the floor of the bedroom. The side of my head is throbbing with a dull ache. My heart is still hammering in my chest, and I roll onto my back and look at the ceiling for a minute or two until my heart rate has come down to a reasonable level. I’m wearing nothing but military-issue skivvies and an undershirt. The environmental controls in the building are turned off at night to save energy, and there’s a cool fall breeze coming in through the filter screens in front of the open windows, but I can feel sweat trickling down my back. I check the chrono projection on the ceiling: 0438.
I get up slowly and without much enthusiasm. In the bed next to me, Halley is asleep. She’s taking deep and regular breaths, so I know her dreams—if she has them—are a little less dramatic than mine. She has a med injector strapped to her arm that monitors her state and keeps her asleep with targeted injections. It’s been over a month since we returned from the Leonidas system, and the bruises on her face and side still haven’t fully faded.
The upstairs guest room at Chief Kopka’s place is tiny, maybe half the size of the already-cramped quarters we shared on Luna in the year before the Leonidas mission, but it’s down here on Earth in civilian country, not on a military installation. It’s also only a fifteen-minute maglev ride away from Homeworld Defense Air Station Burlington, which is where Halley is going to rehab therapy every other day. She survived the ejection from her disintegrating drop ship, but the titanium clamshell capsule of the pilot-ejection pod closed prematurely and wrecked the left side of Halley’s body pretty thoroughly. Her arm, leg, and hip were shattered, she suffered multiple internal injuries, and her skull now has titanium implanted in it. I know that she’s still in a fair bit of pain, but I also know that the injuries don’t hurt her half as much as having her flight status pulled. When it comes to shrugging off physical pain, my wife is the toughest person I know. I hate to see her hurt, but I’m more worried about what her idle status is doing to her head.
I walk over to the bathroom, close the door behind me, and turn on the water in the sink to splash my face. The water here in Vermont still tastes a little wrong to me. It’s as clean as it can be—there’s a pump in the basement of the property that pulls the drinking water right out of the water table in the ground below the town—but I’ve had reprocessed and filtered water all my life, first in the PRCs and then in the service, and my palate is still primed to it.
There’s a window next to the sink, and I open it to let in more of the cool fall air. The street outside is quiet. There are no pedestrians or hydrocars out and about at this hour, and the upper-middle-class ’burber town of Liberty Falls completely lacks the nighttime soundtrack of the PRCs. The first time I slept down here, the lack of constant low-level background noise was so disconcerting to me that it took me half the night to fall asleep because I jumped at every little sound.
When I get back to the bed, Halley is awake. She is blinking at me sleepily, her head surrounded by a self-adjusting inflatable pillow. There’s a big bruise running down the left side of her face from her hairline all the way to her jawline. It was black at first, then faded to blue green, and has now settled into an unhealthy-looking yellow and brown.
“Hey,” I say. “Sorry if I woke you up.”
“’S okay,” Halley mumbles. She blinks up at the holographic time display on the ceiling. “Jeez. You going back to sleep?”
“I don’t think so,” I say. “Gonna go for a run.”
“At this hour?”
“It’s perfect. No civvies to avoid.”
“Okay,” Halley replies. “But you’re on your own on that one.”
The med injector on her arm lets out a soft beep. She reaches over with her right hand and pushes the override sensor that prevents the unit from putting her back to sleep with a dose of painkillers.
“Why are you up? Shit dreams?”
“Shit dreams,” I confirm.
“You okay?”
“I’m fine,” I say. “I’ll go run a bit and clear my head.”
“Okay.” Halley looks at me with concern. “Be back for breakfast, or I’ll call in the Rapid Reaction Force.”
“Affirmative, ma’am.”
The air outside is pleasantly cool and clean. It’s late fall, and the nighttime temperatures have been dipping below freezing for a week or two now, but I like running in the cold air. I run down Liberty Falls’ Main Street, past the shop fronts that are closed at this hour, exhaling little puffs of condensating breath with every step. I’m running in my camouflaged Combat Dress Uniform trousers and an undershirt, with a sidearm strapped to my belt and my personal data pad in the hip pocket. Technically, I’m supposed to carry my alert bag everywhere I go when I am not on duty, but it’s hard to run with twenty-odd pounds of lightweight armor and automatic personal defense weapon slung over my shoulder.
I’ve always hated running, but somehow I’ve grown used to it—maybe even fond of it—in the last month, ever since we got back from Leonidas. It’s what I do to clear my head when I can’t sleep, when I want to be by myself for a while. As a side benefit, I’m also back to the weight I was before I took up the drill-instructor job at Orem for a year, where I got a little flabby on garrison chow.
As often as I have puffed up and down these streets, it’s still a little surreal to be out here alone in the dark. In a PRC, this sort of thing would get me mugged or killed within ten minutes, but the ’burbers here in Liberty Falls are running a tidy, safe town. I usually see a police patrol out here on my run, and this night doesn’t break the streak. When I’m just past the library in the center of town, a police hydrocar glides past me on the street. I glance over to see the cop giving me an appraising look. Then he raises his hand in greeting, and I wave back curtly. The police car continues down Main Street, the electric engine so quiet that I only hear the tires whispering on the asphalt.
Right behind the town hall, there’s a road that veers off and goes up a hill. I’ve not yet made it up that half-kilometer incline without stopping for breath, but I get a little further each morning. Today I get more than halfway up the hill before my legs start getting heavy. This may just be the day I beat the hill and make it to the residential neighborhood at the top.
I’m three-quarters of the way up, winded but still in fighting shape, when my PDP chirps a message alert. It’s the three-short, three-long, three-short pattern reserved for Priority One emergencies. I stop and catch my breath for a few moments. Then I fish the PDP out of my leg pocket while eyeing the crest of the hill, just a few hundred meters away, a few more minutes o
f huffing and puffing up a ten-degree slope.
Tomorrow, I guess.
The screen of my PDP shows only a short message, but the content serves to give me a healthy boost of adrenaline that makes my fatigue all but vanish.
“LANKY INCURSION IN PROGRESS—ALL OFF-DUTY PERSONNEL REPORT TO DESIGNATED RMAP AT ONCE—THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”
RMAPs are the regional military assembly points, the closest bases with air/space fields to wherever we’re spending our liberty or leave. For me and Halley, that’s Homeworld Defense Air Station Burlington, fifteen minutes away. I slip my PDP back into my leg pocket and start running back down the hill.
Back at the chief’s place, Halley is out of bed and half-dressed when I gallop up the stairs and into the guest bedroom above the restaurant. I peel off my sweat-soaked T-shirt and toss it aside, then grab a fresh one off the dresser.
“Breakfast will have to wait,” I say.
“I got the alert,” she says. “I’m coming, too.”
“Like hell you are. You’re in rehab and off flight status until the doc clears you.”
“Try and stop me, Lieutenant,” she says. “Would have had to go out to Burlington today anyway for the next physical-terrorism session. I might as well put on a flight suit just in case the shit hits the fan and they happen to have more birds than pilots on hand.”
I know better than to argue about this with Halley, who is already zipping up her suit. I want her to return to bed and accept the reality that she’s in no shape for a fight, that no wing commander is going to put her behind the controls of a drop ship as long as the military doc has her grounded. But I know that I don’t have the right to make that call for her. So even though I don’t want to, I take her shoulder holster from its place on the dresser and help her put it on. She winces a little when she threads her left arm through the harness, but then the holster is in place, and she’s dressed and armed for battle for the first time since she came home to the solar system with me a month ago on a trauma cradle in the sick bay of NACS Portsmouth. She gives the holstered pistol under her arm a quick pat with her right hand.
