Fields of Fire (Frontlines Book 5)

by Marko Kloos

  Every major warship in the fleet has a Grunt Country, the berthing section reserved for the ship’s Spaceborne Infantry or SOCOM contingent. Frigates can carry a platoon; destroyers and light cruisers carry two. A Hammerhead space control cruiser is built for supporting planetary assaults, so it can carry a full company, and their Grunt Country makes up a fairly big chunk of real estate in the aft end of the ship. On Phalanx, it occupies two sections on either side of a passageway close to the main fore-and-aft “expressway” in this part of the hull. I consult my PDP for the location of the administrative section and step into the module where the command element is housed.

  There’s no name tag on the hatch of my new commanding officer’s space, just a sign that says “CO SOCOM DET”—commanding officer, special operations command detachment. The hatch is halfway open, and I knock on the doorframe.

  “Come in,” a familiar voice says.

  I push the hatch open all the way and see Major Masoud, the man who led the mission to Arcadia a month and a half ago, the man who put a gun to the collective head of the old NAC leadership and won us the battle. He’s sitting behind his desk, typing on a data pad.

  “Lieutenant Grayson, reporting as ordered, sir,” I say, and salute, the traditional gesture indicating a respect that I don’t really feel for the major since his stunt on Arcadia. I know he considered me and my troops expendable back then, and I have no reason to believe that his attitude has changed.

  Major Masoud looks up from his data pad and nods. “Come in, Lieutenant. Have a seat.”

  I do as ordered and sit down in the chair in front of Major Masoud’s desk. He’s wearing Fleet fatigues, with the sleeves rolled up so smoothly and tightly that I’d probably need a magnifying glass to spot any wrinkles.

  “Welcome to SOCOM Task Force Red,” Major Masoud says. He smiles a wry little smile. “Incidentally, there are exactly as many letters in that name as there are members in it.”

  I count the letters up in my head. “Seventeen,” I say.

  Major Masoud nods. “And we’re lucky to even have that number.”

  “So what are we doing, sir?” With a measly seventeen troops, I don’t add.

  “The mission briefing will take place after the task force has assembled. But you will be performing in your main MOS for the assault, if that is your main concern. You’ll be our unit’s combat controller.”

  “Copy that, sir. Anything else you can share before the official mission briefing?”

  Major Masoud gives me a thin-lipped smile. “If I told you that I don’t know much more than you do, would you believe me?”

  “No, sir,” I say. “Not after Leonidas.”

  He looks at me for a moment, still smiling. “I suppose I can’t blame you.”

  He picks up his data pad again and taps the screen a few times. “We’re going to Mars. That’s no big secret. And SOCOM will be first in the dirt, as usual. That’s about all. The details are just garnish at this point, aren’t they?”

  “Yes, sir. But they’re still nice to know.”

  A month and a half ago, when he stepped off the drop ship after the surrender of the renegade colony at Arcadia, I could have shot this stocky little bastard on the spot. He used my platoon as bait to lead the garrison on a wild-goose chase while his SEAL teams stuck nuclear demolition charges to half the terraformers on that moon. In the time since the mission, I’ve had enough time to reflect and realize that he did the absolute best with what he had, and that our final body count was an exceedingly cheap price to pay for what we got out of the mission. But I’ll never forget the fact that he used my troops as a diversion without letting us in on the plan. Thirty dead, and if Halley hadn’t been exceedingly lucky, I would be a widower right now. Professionally, I have to admire this crafty, ruthless bastard. Personally, I can’t help but hate him.

  “I’ll share what I can when we are under way,” Major Masoud says. “Phalanx is departing for the fleet assembly point in thirteen hours. I suggest you get settled and meet your teammates. Take care of any last-minute comms business. We’ll be cruising under EMCON once we’re under way.”

  “Yes, sir.” I get up, salute, and turn to walk out of Major Masoud’s little office again.

  “And Lieutenant?”

  I turn around again. “Yes, sir?”

  “It’s good to have you on the team. And I say that without reservation.”

  “Thank you, sir,” I say, mildly surprised.

  Joining a new command always reminds me a little bit of those awkward first days of class in a new school, when you have to get used to your environment and get a feel for the social flow of the place at the same time. But the Special Operations community was small enough even before we lost three-quarters of SOCOM, so I expect to see at least a few familiar faces on Phalanx, and I am not disappointed.

  I step into the mission-personnel berth with my kit bag to one of the strangest sights I’ve seen on a fleet warship. The berthing area looks a lot like the module for my platoon on Portsmouth—four staterooms on either side of the entry hatch, a larger assembly space beyond, and group berths on the far side of that. In the assembly space, there’s enough room for four foldout tables and benches to form booths, and there are a dozen troops sitting at those tables and engrossed in conversation. Five of them are wearing the distinctive mottled camo pattern of SRA marines. The SRA trooper closest to the door has his back turned to me, but he turns around when the SI troopers on the other side of the table spot me and pause their conversation. Dmitry Chistyakov, senior sergeant of the SRA marines, raises a hand in a casual greeting, as if he had just spotted me across the room in a bar on New Svalbard.

  “Andrew,” he says. “Is good to see you. Come and sit.” He nods at an empty section of bench across the table from him.

  “Gentlemen,” I say to the NAC troopers at the table with Dmitry. They nod at me, and I slide into the booth next to them. One is an SI lieutenant, and the other is a fleet master sergeant. The lieutenant has the black beret of the SI’s Force Recon arm tucked underneath his rank sleeve, and the master sergeant is a Spaceborne Rescueman. All around us, the conversations in the room pick up again.

  “Do you know this character?” the Force Recon lieutenant asks, and nods at Dmitry.

  “You could say that,” I say. “We’ve dropped together, in Fomalhaut. He knows his stuff.”

  Just a little over a year ago, it would have been almost unthinkable to see an SRA trooper on a Commonwealth warship in any place but the brig. Seeing not one, but five of them here in the troop berth without handcuffs or armed NAC guards standing next to them is still a crazy thing to see. And if it seems crazy to me, with all my exposure to the SRA troops during our joint mission in Fomalhaut, I can’t imagine just how bizarre the sight must be to the NAC troops who weren’t there with us.

  “What’s the word from upstairs, Lieutenant?” the Spaceborne Rescueman asks.

  “We’re going to war, I think,” I reply, and the other troops at the table chuckle. “Seriously, I haven’t heard much,” I tell the master sergeant. “Our CO isn’t the chatty type. We’re leaving for the assembly point in thirteen hours. That’s about all I know.”

  The master sergeant looks around in the room and shrugs. “Doesn’t take much intel to figure out what we’re going to do,” he says. “Podheads, the lot of us.”

  “First into the LZ,” I agree. “How long has it been since your last pod drop?”

  “Year and a half, not counting training drops. You?”

  “Same. It’s all been taxi rides ever since.” I look over at the SRA trooper sitting next to Dmitry, who follows the conversation with a politely neutral expression. “Who’s your colleague, Dmitry?”

  Dmitry points at the trooper next to him. “Mládshiy Leytenánt Bondarenko,” he says. “Leader of Alliance reconnaissance squad. And at other table is Sergeant Gerasimov, Sergeant Dragomirova, and Mládshiy Serzhánt Anokhin.”

  At the other table, the SRA troopers he name
s raise their hands in greeting one by one when they hear their names. Sergeant Dragomirova, who has long dark hair that’s tightly pulled back and secured in a ponytail, flicks a little salute with the cup in her hand. Then they resume their conversations with the NAC troops at their tables.

  “Is good squad,” Dmitry says. “Good fighters. Have killed many Lankies together. I drop with them a few times before.”

  Considering the newness of the situation, and the fact that until a year ago, we were still in a shooting war with the SRA, the atmosphere in the personnel berth is downright low-key. It helps that the berths and common areas of a warship aren’t terrifically spacious and don’t lend themselves to keeping one’s distance. And I do notice that the SRA troopers and their NAC counterparts sit across the tables from each other and don’t mingle on the same benches. But overall, the SI troopers seem to be rather laid-back about having their former enemies in their midst. With the assault against the Lankies imminent, it seems that old animosities aren’t all that important anymore. We will fight those things together, just like we did at Fomalhaut, and we will live or die together.

  “You learn any Russian, Andrew?” Dmitry asks. “You have year to learn.”

  “Da, nemnogo,” I reply. Yes, a little. Dmitry rewards this with a smile and a nod.

  “You spend time well since last year,” he says. “No longer squishy around middle.”

  “How’s Maksim?” I ask. Dmitry smiles again, clearly pleased that I remembered the name of his spouse.

  “Still big. Little less dumb. Maybe you will meet him on Mars. Eight hundred seventy-sixth Desant Battalion, on carrier Rossiya.” I see the shadow of a sorrowful frown on his face as he mentions the unit of his husband, and I know exactly what he’s feeling right now. Both our spouses are riding out to this battle as well, but in different units and embarked on different ships, and barring an extremely unlikely coincidence, our paths on the battlefield won’t cross. We will see them after the battle, or never again.

  “You ever drop in an NAC bio-pod before?”

  “Yes,” Dmitry says. “In simulator. Is not so hard. Pod does all the flying. You are just bullet in big gun.”

  “That’s pretty much it in a nutshell,” I say, and look over my shoulder at the rest of the troopers in the common space. The berthing module is designed to hold a whole platoon, forty personnel, and we’re not even half that number.

  “Three fire teams, a pair of combat controllers, and a medic,” I say. “That better be a really small LZ, or we’ll be stretched mighty thin.”

  The hatch of the berthing module opens, and I look to see who’s arriving. For just a moment, I have the wild, irrational hope that Halley is going to walk into the room unexpectedly, just like she did on Portsmouth. But the newcomer isn’t my wife. It’s a soldier in Eurocorps camo, and he has a fleet sergeant in tow. The Eurocorps trooper is a wiry guy with an ultrashort buzz cut. He wears a blue Euro flag on one sleeve, the black-red-gold German flag on the other, and lieutenant-rank insignia on the front of his camo tunic.

  “Sirs,” the fleet sergeant behind him says. “This is Lieutenant Stahl. He’s this ship’s Eurocorps liaison.”

  “Germans, Russians, North Americans,” I say to the table in a low voice. “It’s like a little United Nations in here all of a sudden.”

  “Not like United Nations,” Dmitry says. “We are not, how do you say, debate club? We are better at shooting things a lot, I think.”

  “That’s the only thing we’re good at,” I correct.

  There aren’t many private spots on a warship, not even one the size of Phalanx, but after a few years in the fleet, you figure out where the quiet corners on each type of ship are located. Phalanx is a Hammerhead cruiser, halfway between a destroyer and an assault carrier in size, and she has a little astrogation deck in her dorsal hull, a small polyplast bubble on top of the armor, accessible through a narrow ladder. It’s a long climb through two decks’ worth of laminate armor plating, so it’s not occupied very often. But when I go up there to compose a few messages to Halley and my mother while looking at the stars, there’s someone else sitting in one of the observation chairs already.

  “Excuse me, ma’am,” I say when I see the rank insignia on the sleeves of the occupant’s uniform. “I didn’t know you were up here.”

  Colonel Yamin, Phalanx’s commanding officer, nods at the row of empty chairs in front of her.

  “No intrusion, Lieutenant. This is a crew space, after all. Come and sit. I was just about to leave anyway.”

  I finish climbing out of the ladder well and walk over to one of the chairs to sit down.

  So far, I’ve only known the skipper as a disembodied voice on the 1MC. The woman in the standard Fleet uniform sitting in the chair across from mine has long dark hair, green eyes, and a vaguely sad and pensive air about her. She reminds me a little bit of Halley, only with another ten years of combat and hard choices etched into her face.

  “You’re one of the SOCOM guys,” she says.

  “Yes, ma’am. Combat controller. First ones down, last ones up.”

  She looks at the ring on my right hand and nods toward it. “Podhead’s not a great job for a married man.”

  “She doesn’t mind. She’s a drop-ship jock. At least we both have our asses on the line at the same time.”

  “How long have you been doing this?”

  “Five years in this specialty. Married for a little over a year. We got married on Regulus right before the Lanky incursion last year.” I smile at the memory. “She had the skipper marry us while the ship was in condition Zebra and getting ready for battle.”

  “Sounds like she has her priorities straight,” Colonel Yamin says with a little smile.

  I look at the stars outside the ten-meter polyplast bubble of the observatory. “I’ve been in the fleet almost seven years. I feel like I ought to be able to identify constellations by sight. But I still can’t tell most of them apart.”

  “They drill that into you in cap-ship officer school,” Colonel Yamin says. “Like we’re ever going to stand up here with a sextant and navigate a thirty-thousand-ton cruiser by eyeballs.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not even a real officer. Limited duty. Got promoted last year, right before the Leonidas mission.”

  I remember half a second too late that Phalanx was one of the ships stolen by the renegade NAC government, part of the fleet reclaimed by nuclear blackmail.

  “How long have you had Phalanx?” I ask.

  “Two and a half years. I took command six months before the Lankies kicked us off Mars.” She gives me a sad little smile. “Yes, Lieutenant, I am one of those people. The ones who tucked tail and ran.”

  “I’m sure you had your reasons, ma’am,” I say, careful to sound neutral. A little over a month ago, this woman was with the group that tried to kill us while we tried to kill them right back. All the ship commanders are still in charge of their units, but the ones who went with the renegade government have suspicious eyes on them at all times, and there’s still talk about a court-martial for them after Mars if any make it back alive.

  “Everyone has reasons for what they do,” she replies. “Sometimes they’re even good ones. If there’s one thing I learned from it all, it’s that I am in no position to judge someone else’s.”

  “We fought,” I say. “When you were all gone, and the Lankies came calling. We fought with what you left us. Frigates, corvettes, all the old shit you didn’t take. We stopped them, but you have no idea what it cost us.”

  She looks at me, and I can see anger welling up behind those green eyes. Then she sighs and shakes her head slightly. “When the Lankies took Mars, we were docked in orbit,” she says. “Getting ready to make the run back to Earth, for refits and crew R & R. Half the crew was planetside. My XO got killed on the surface, rescuing settlers. I sent this ship out to save shuttles and lifeboats. Lots of lifeboats. We gave them everything we had, which is a lot. You know the firepower of a Hammerhead. They
shrugged it off like we were throwing pebbles.”

  She speaks softly, recounting her memories as if retelling a dream.

  “Of the crew I had left, I lost two hundred when the Lankies hit us. We patched her up and limped back to Earth. The ship was unable to fight, barely able to run. And then we passed the counterattack going the other way.”

  She closes her eyes and tilts her head back.

  “My little brother was on one of the ships in the counterattack. I told them it was no good. Told them they’d be running themselves against a wall for nothing. They went anyway because they had to. And my brother didn’t come back.”

  I don’t say anything, and the silence between us stretches out for a few moments.

  “I would have turned the ship around if I had been able to fight with them. But I had four hundred crew left who didn’t need to die for nothing. So we went home, and instead of coming home with Darius, I got to give my father a flag folded into a triangle. We didn’t even have a burial capsule to drape it over, because his ship was lost with all hands above Mars. So don’t tell me I don’t know what it cost you. We all paid dearly. Those who left, and those who didn’t.”

  “I wouldn’t have left with them,” I say. “I wouldn’t have left everyone behind.”

  “You say that now,” she says, and looks at me evenly, without anger. “Your wife is in the fleet. My parents and my kids were not. They let me take my kids, but not my mom and dad. I left my parents behind to save my kids.”

  I don’t have a snappy response for that, so I just look at the field of stars above our heads. I try to imagine what I would do if I had to make a choice between Halley or Mom, choose one of them to come to safety with me and leave the other one to near-certain death.

  Colonel Yamin takes a slow, long breath, exhales, and gets out of her chair. Then she tugs on the front of her uniform to smooth it out.