by Marko Kloos
BY MARKO KLOOS
Frontlines
Terms of Enlistment
Lines of Departure
Angles of Attack
Chains of Command
Fields of Fire
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 © 2018 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: 9781542048460
ISBN-10: 154204846X
Cover design by Ray Lundgren
Cover illustrated by Paul Youll
For Robin, Lyra, and Quinn, my galactic center.
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1 OLYMPUS HIGHWAY PATROL
CHAPTER 2 MATERIAL FATIGUE
CHAPTER 3 PROMISES TO KEEP
CHAPTER 4 LEAVE
CHAPTER 5 EARTHSIDE
CHAPTER 6 FLEET YARD DAEDALUS
CHAPTER 7 THAT NEW SHIP SMELL
CHAPTER 8 AN UNPLEASANT REUNION
CHAPTER 9 TALKING STUFF OUT
CHAPTER 10 EARTH TO TITAN
CHAPTER 11 A PLEASANT REUNION
CHAPTER 12 EXOS
CHAPTER 13 EASY MODE
CHAPTER 14 WAR GAMES
CHAPTER 15 SHORE LEAVE
CHAPTER 16 URGENT DISPATCH
CHAPTER 17 WAR STORIES
CHAPTER 18 AVENGER
CHAPTER 19 CQB
CHAPTER 20 GHOSTS IN THE SNOW
CHAPTER 21 SECOND NEW SVALBARD
CHAPTER 22 REQUIEM FOR A COLONY
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PROLOGUE
I’ve been at war for most of my adult life.
When I was a kid, there wasn’t much to do in the Public Residence Clusters other than getting into trouble or watching Networks. I wasn’t good at getting out of trouble again, so instead of running the streets, I read books and watched a lot of shows.
My favorite stuff to watch was the military shows, the ones that ran year after year. Steady casts of actors who became more familiar to you than your own family, playing hard-bitten sergeants and officers doing battle with The Enemy, whoever that happened to be in that season. Some shows were what I now know to be hyperpatriotic bullshit, and some were a little more gritty and critical of the war machine, but they all had something in common: there was always a victory in the end. It may have been hard-won at terrible cost, but there was never a doubt that victory had been achieved against The Enemy.
Turns out all those shows were full of shit.
Real war—it’s not like that at all. In real war, you don’t often get a clear-cut victory. Sometimes you battle The Enemy, and you both walk away from the fight exhausted, bleeding, and mentally bruised, without any clear victory to show for it, no patch of ground or objective to point to and say, “That’s what we earned with the lives of ten thousand grunts and sailors.” Sometimes, both sides just sort of grind to a halt because they can’t keep up the fight anymore, because we’ve bled each other to the point where you can’t continue fighting, but you’ve sacrificed so much that you can’t just concede defeat, either. So you retreat to your respective corners for however long it takes to recover enough to fight another round.
Mars was just like that.
Three years ago, we tried to take it back from the Lankies, and they tried to hang on to it. Neither of us were successful, but neither side really got defeated, either. We lost more than ten thousand troops in the offensive. The Lankies tempted us into overextending our lines, and then they emerged from prepared positions dug into the Martian rock, an extensive tunnel network many hundreds of kilometers long. We got off that planet in time to save more than half the troops we had brought, but we ran out of time and ammunition to keep up the fight that day. In the end, we killed thousands of Lankies, nuked all the seed ships they were growing under the surface, destroyed their terraformers, and fucked up Mars for humans and Lankies alike with the help of hundreds of nuclear warheads.
But there were no ticker-tape parades back home, no moving footage of surviving settlers getting rescued by Spaceborne Infantry troops, no parade down the middle of the main avenue in Olympus City. Just a bunch of funerals, folded flags, and somber speeches, ten thousand times all over the North American Commonwealth and the Sino-Russian Alliance. We hadn’t lost, but we damn sure hadn’t won, either. But if we couldn’t use Mars anymore, neither could the Lankies, and the incursions stopped. If there are seed ships left, they hightailed it out of the solar system, because none of our units have spotted one since the Second Battle of Mars. Three years without a Lanky seed ship sighting and some people think we may have beaten them for good, driven them back to wherever they came from.
Most of us know better. So we are preparing for the next round, all of us. NAC and SRA and all the other world alliances, pulling on the same rope even though we’re still bickering and in-fighting like a giant dysfunctional family. The NAC lost the priceless Agincourt, but the Sino-Russians still have Arkhangelsk, and we have improved the Orion missiles that let us wipe out the Lanky fleet gathered above Mars. But even with the prodigious appetite of our power blocs for weapons of mass destruction, it turns out that we can run out of nuclear warheads when each of those Orions takes hundreds of nukes for propellant. Uranium and plutonium are suddenly in short supply, and the power blocs on Earth have strip-mined all their old atomic warhead stocks. All our nukes are fuel for missiles now, aimed into space instead of pointed at cities on Earth, one of the few positive side effects of the Lanky threat.
The NAC was cash-strapped even before the Lankies came. Now we’re positively broke. Luckily, the European Union and the well-heeled countries of the Pacific Rim recognized that the defense of Earth is a problem for all countries, not just for the NAC or the SRA alone. So we’ve been getting new equipment and operating cash, along with the benefits of shared research and development.
We’ve trained new troops to build up our spaceborne fighting power yet again. We’ve used the influx of new money from the rest of the world to rearm, reorganize, and develop new gear, all while keeping a close eye on the stars. The Lankies may not be in the solar system anymore, but they’re out there, sitting on the colonies they took away from us over the years. And I have no doubt that we will clash again soon. The only question is who will have the guts to strike the next blow first.
I fulfilled a promise after Mars and joined the Lazarus Brigades as a Fleet adviser, training troops and getting mixed up in PRC conflicts for a year and a half. In the past I’ve battled Lankies and the SRA on desolate rock piles thirty light-years or more from home, but those eighteen months on Earth were harder and more dangerous than anything I’ve seen or done out in the black. As tedious and dangerous as my Fleet job can get, finally going back to it felt almost like being let out of purgatory. Some of the things I saw and did when I was with the Brigades will forever weigh down my conscience. Even Halley doesn’t know the full story, and I doubt I’ll ever burden her with that knowledge.
But for now, I am back at my j
ob, doing what I’ve been trained to do. There are still Lankies on Mars, and I’m part of the cleanup crew that steps on the roaches whenever they leave their dark hiding spots and scurry around in the light. We can’t have Mars back, but we’ll be damned if we let them have it, either.
CHAPTER 1
OLYMPUS HIGHWAY PATROL
“Contact at forty degrees relative, Captain.”
The courtesy warning of the pilot yanks me out of the half-dozing state I’ve been in for the last fifteen minutes or so. I sit upright in my jump seat and scan the console display in front of me. The drop ship is bouncing a bit in the rough air, but after three months of endless atmospheric patrols above Mars, I can nap through anything short of a category four hurricane.
“Hang on,” I say. “Checking the scopes.”
The drop ship is a Dragonfly—but not a standard battle taxi model. This one is a Dragonfly-SR, a modification they cooked up just for this particular job. The SR variant has high-powered optical sensor arrays all over the outside of the hull. Lankies don’t show on radar or infrared, but they can’t hide from camera lenses. On the downside, the constant shit weather on Mars means that the SRs have to fly under the low cloud ceiling to spot Lankies, and that makes for long and boring patrols. Eight-hour shifts of looking at consoles and getting bounced around by the winds at low altitude. The SRs have auxiliary fuel tanks on the wing pylons instead of missiles so they can actually stay aloft for closer to twelve hours, but the limiting factor is the endurance of the human crew.
“Well, hello there, Mr. Lanky,” I say when I see the familiar spindly form of one striding across the surface a few kilometers in front of our portside bow. A few moments later, the software of the optical array draws an outline around another suspected contact, and the second Lanky emerges from the haze in the predicted spot.
“Target,” I call out to the pilot. “Two large hostile organisms, bearing zero-five-zero, distance forty-five hundred, speed fifty klicks per.”
“They’re in a hurry,” the pilot remarks. “Getting skittish down there.”
“You would be, too, if someone dropped guided munitions on your head every time you went outside for a stroll.”
“What do you want to do here?” the pilot asks.
I think about it for a second. We generally kill surface-dwelling Lankies on sight, but the way those two are moving makes it look like they have a destination, and they’re not just running from the sound of the engines they may have heard. The Dragonflies are quiet, but the Lankies that are still alive are the most careful and skittish of what’s left, and there’s no telling if they’ve heard or spotted us from over four kilometers away and three thousand feet up in the air.
“Hang a starboard turn; then come back around to port and do a loop,” I tell the pilot. “Keep four klicks’ separation. I want to see where those guys are heading.”
“Copy that.”
The drop ship tilts into a right-hand turn that momentarily takes us away from the Lankies, but the camera arrays stay fixed on our adversaries with computer precision. It’s incredibly tedious and labor-intensive to flush out Lankies by skimming across the planet’s surface with nothing but optics, but it doesn’t tip them off to our presence with active radiation.
We nuked much of Mars comprehensively three years ago at the close of the Second Battle of Mars. Every Lanky settlement was a seed ship under construction beneath the Martian rock, and we dropped bunker-busting penetrator nukes on every one of the building sites. That sort of nuclear detonation is the dirtiest possible one because of the irradiated soil and rock that gets pulverized and then dispersed all over the place. Most of Mars is so radioactive now that our suits’ Geiger counters sound like high-cadence machine guns on full auto fire. Every time we get back to the carrier after a mission, the bird gets to spend twenty minutes in the decontamination lock before we are allowed off. But the Lankies seem to be immune to radiation, because even after three years, there are still plenty of them alive underground, judging by our kill rate on the surface.
The Dragonfly-SR changes direction and banks to port for a sweeping turn that takes us around the Lankies on the ground. The targeting computer keeps the crosshairs of the observation optics firmly on the creatures as they trot across the dusty Mars soil. They don’t look up or give any other indication that we have been noticed, but they move like they have a purpose. I watch them walk down a slope and into a wide ravine, kicking up puffs of ochre dirt with every step. It’s hard to be sitting in an armed drop ship and drawing a bead on live Lankies without pulling a trigger, but I’ve learned to delay gratification. When you want to kill a lot of wasps, you don’t hunt them down and swat them individually. You follow them back to the nest and then torch the whole thing.
“Call it in?” the pilot asks.
“Not yet,” I reply. “Let’s not spook ’em. And I want some more accurate target reference point data before we waste ordnance on just two runners.”
“Your show,” the pilot sends back. He sounds as tired as I imagine I do. We’re at the tail end of our eight-hour patrol, one of only half a dozen SR-modified drop ships above the northern hemisphere of Mars right now, and reaction times are slow. After hour five, you just sort of mentally start checking out and looking forward to chow and a hot shower back on the carrier.
When we spot Lankies, I have several ways of dealing with them. There’s a rotary launcher taking up most of the cargo bay behind me, and it’s loaded with a dozen guided missiles with 250-kilogram warheads. Those are for lone stragglers and small groups, and we can launch them right out of the tail end of the drop ship. For larger groups, I can call down kinetic strikes from orbital assets or request tactical air support from the carrier’s Shrikes. And if we find a buried seed ship or even suspect there may be one, I can request a nuclear strike from the carrier, which will send down a thermonuclear warhead piggybacking behind a high-density penetrator designed to deliver the nuke dozens of meters into the Martian rock before lighting off the payload. It’s a nasty, brutal way to fight, but the alternative would be to lose tens of thousands of troops in those underground tunnels in close combat with a physically far superior enemy. We’re done trying to meet the Lankies on even terms. Now we stack the deck in our favor any way we can, even if it means fighting dirty and leaving nothing behind but irradiated soil.
I’m the only person in the cargo hold, so there’s no one to talk to while I observe the Lankies. I don’t want to distract the pilots from their jobs with noncritical observations, and we keep our signals traffic with the orbital units to the bare minimum to keep our emissions signature low. So I study the plot and the camera feeds silently, letting my brain do the calculations on autopilot. We don’t have Shrikes on patrol over the hemisphere right now, so there’s no close-air support nearby to call upon. My plot shows another Dragonfly-SR almost a thousand klicks to our east, and a whole lot of nothing otherwise. There are three units in orbit, but only one is close to a good launch window for an orbital strike—the frigate Berlin, the ship that was part of our tiny task force for the commando raid into the Leonidas system three years ago. She was held together with patch welds and hopeful prayers back then already, and three years of combat ops have not improved her condition any.
The Lankies continue their descent into the wide ravine and then stroll northwest, following the course of what looks like an ancient riverbed. I pan one of the optics clusters and look at the terrain ahead of the Lankies to predict where they’re headed. These days, whenever we spot them on the surface, they’re never away from shelter for long. They’ve either always preferred the subterranean lifestyle or they have adapted to our hardware limitations frighteningly fast. Without anyone to observe the colonies they took over, there’s no way to know which is true, but we’ll have a tough job ahead of us either way.
“There we go,” I murmur to myself when I spot the dark irregularity of a tunnel entrance just half a kilometer ahead of the Lankies. It’s tucked into a side
wall of the ravine, extending a natural rift in the rock wall, and if you didn’t know exactly what to look for, you’d be likely to miss it or write it off as a natural terrain feature. But when I zoom in, my suspicions are verified by the obvious Lanky footprints in the dust and soil in front of the entrance. They’ve been going in and out of there for a while, and they haven’t yet managed to sweep their tracks effectively.
“Got a tunnel entrance half a klick ahead of the Lankies, bearing three-thirty. They’ll get there in another minute at the rate they’re going.”
“Call in orbital?” the pilot asks. “We won’t get them before they go underground, but we may bust a nest or something.”
“There’s no way to tell how long that tunnel is before it reaches a hideout,” I reply. “Could be ten kilometers, could be fifty. Let’s pop these before they get under cover. At least we’ll be rid of them.”
I flip the cover from the fire control of the rotary launcher and hit the switch for the tail ramp with my other hand. The ramp opens with its soft hydraulic whine that’s almost immediately drowned out by the wind noise. The launcher control panel switches from STANDBY/SAFE to ARMED/LIVE.
“I’ve got fire control,” I tell the pilot. “Putting two on the Lankies and two more into the tunnel mouth. Come to heading three-five-five and hold her level.”
“Copy,” the pilot acknowledges. “Coming to three-five-five and holding level.”
The drop ship comes out of its wide left-hand turn and straightens out on the bearing I specified. The rotary launchers we mounted in the cargo bays of the SR models save us the necessity for a gunship nearby, but they have limitations in use. They’re pig-heavy and use up almost all the atmospheric lift capacity of the Dragonflies, and they can only be fired without danger when the ship is in a specific and narrow speed and attitude envelope.
On the targeting screen in front of me, I drag target markers onto the Lankies—one, two. Numbers three and four go onto the entrance of the cave, programmed for a horizontal ingress. The launcher can only fire once every two seconds because the rotary mechanism needs time to move the next half-ton missile into launch position, and I want the Lankies to be the first hit so they don’t have advance warning of the incoming ordnance.
