by Marko Kloos
“All things considered, you did an exemplary job,” the CAG tells us. He’s a major in his early thirties, not much older than I am. “You verified the pilot’s status and secured his ID tag, got to a safe spot, and called down air support on the remaining Lankies. That’s six confirmed kills today.”
“Yes, sir,” I reply. Out of a thousand left underground, I don’t say out loud.
“We’re rotating out in seventy-two hours,” the XO says. “Intrepid is arriving on station in eighteen hours to relieve us, and we’ll hand over the shop to them. Why don’t you two grab some chow and rack time and then go on standby for the rest of the rotation? And go see the counselor if you need to.”
“Yes, sir,” Brassey and I say simultaneously.
“Dismissed. And good work down there, both of you. Despite everything else.”
We leave the briefing room and go our separate ways. Lieutenant Brassey’s place is down in Pilot Country, and I am not a part of that world. They’ll need time among themselves to grieve the loss of one of theirs, and nobody takes that sort of thing lightly over sandwiches in the officer wardroom. I didn’t know the pilot very well, despite having flown a dozen or more missions with him behind the stick. Once upon a time, I would have been social across departmental boundaries, but these days I mostly keep to myself. You get attached to people, then they die, and you have to deal with the grief and the anger.
Seventy-two hours until we head back to Earth, and there’s a week of transit ahead of us after we light the engines and burn for Gateway Station. Being on a Fleet ship with nothing to do for ten days is both a luxury and a tedium. Nobody’s shooting at you, but the hours trickle by at a glacial pace. There are a few major advantages to serving in an understaffed and overextended Fleet—I have a private stateroom in Officer Country, and there’s no crowd at chow or in the RecFac no matter the time of day. They also restored the big comms relay between Earth and Mars, but there’s nobody left on Mars to take advantage of the bandwidth. We can vid-chat home in high definition because the few garrison ships of the Olympus Highway Patrol have the relay mostly to themselves.
“What the fuck is that thing?” I ask Halley, who is coming in sharp and clear over the Fleet vid-chat link.
“What thing?”
I point at my screen. “That staff officer bar on your rank sleeves.”
Halley looks at the rank insignia on her shoulders—a single star above a horizontal bar—as if she’s seeing them for the first time.
“Huh. Would you look at that? How did that get there?”
“You made major already? You don’t have the time in service yet.”
“That’s what I told them, too. But it goes with the new assignment I’m starting next month.”
“O-4 is, what, ten years in service at the earliest?”
“Used to be,” she confirms. “Ten years in service, three years in grade as O-3. I have eight in service and two in grade. They insisted. What are you so surprised about, Andrew? You got your third star early, too.”
“That’s different,” I say, and glance at my own rank insignia, the three stars of a captain I’ve been wearing for three months now. “I’m a junior officer. Time in grade to make captain was only three years even before the Lanky business.” I just now parse her earlier reveal. “Wait. New assignment? Back to teaching at Drop Ship U?”
“Thank the gods, no.” Halley grins and shakes her head. “I have had my fill of classrooms and simulators.”
“So where’s the new gig?”
“Assault Transport Squadron Five. I’ll be their new XO.”
“Congratulations,” I say. “Major. Where’s ATS-5?”
“Right now they only exist on paper. They’re getting assigned to a new ship. I’ll be reporting to Combat Aviation School on Luna to help ferry the hardware.”
“Could be worse,” I say, which is of course a massive understatement. The only class of ship that fits a whole squadron of drop ships is one of the Fleet’s few remaining carriers, which are the most spacious and modern units in the Fleet. Halley and I started our careers on a cramped old frigate that would probably fit into a supercarrier’s hangar bay in its entirety once you knocked off all the antenna arrays and trimmed the exhaust nozzles by a few meters.
“What’s your status? Your rotation should be just about over,” Halley says.
“It is. We’re getting relieved by Intrepid in a few hours, and then we’re heading home. I don’t have new orders yet. This ship’s headed for the fleet yard, though.”
“Maybe we can have some leave time together. It’s been six months. Why did you have to do two rotations back to back?”
“They told me to,” I say. “But yeah. Shore leave sounds good. I have no shortage of leave time.”
“Then get your ass home, Captain.”
“I’ll tell the helmsman to step on it.”
I briefly think about telling Halley about the drop ship crash and my latest close call, but then I decide to put it off until we can see each other in person. I could have died but didn’t, something that has happened to us a hundred times each in the last eight years. If I talk about it, I want to be out on a walk in the mountains of Vermont, not sitting in front of a terminal screen. So I sign off with a smile, as if my last few hours have involved nothing more exciting than stubbing a toe on a hatch ledge. We do what we have to do to keep ourselves sane in this grind.
CHAPTER 3
PROMISES TO KEEP
Every time I dock at Gateway again, I’m surprised that the station hasn’t yet fallen out of its orbit and rained down on the North American continent in a shower of glowing wreckage parts. I don’t know what the expected service life of the station was when they opened it, but I know that Gateway is well past it. Many of the high-traffic corridors and concourses have ruts walked into the nonslip deck padding, and I’ve never made a transfer between two nonadjacent airlocks when I didn’t pass a corridor that was closed and secured with safety barriers because of urgent maintenance. There are only so many times you can patch and weld a piece of hull section or bulkhead before the whole thing starts crumbling at the seams.
Hornet is going to the fleet yard for an overhaul, and a big chunk of her crew is leaving the ship here at Gateway to catch rides to their next commands, which means that getting off the ship is a royal pain in the ass. Thousands of crew and embarked SI troopers have to pass through the same airlock. At least Gateway isn’t as crowded as I’ve seen it lately. With the garrison force on Mars in an established deployment cycle, we no longer have to move everything on the board at the same time. Even with all the new arrivals from Hornet, I can make my way along the main concourse without getting pushed along or knocking my gear bag into people.
At the transfer station, a Fleet staff sergeant and two corporals manage to look both bored and harried at the same time. I let them scan my orders, and they assign me a seat on a shuttle.
“Eighteen hundred hours,” I say and check my chrono. “That’s six and a half hours from now. You have no other transport going down to the biggest Fleet base on the East Coast earlier than that?”
“None that have any space on them, Captain.” The staff sergeant in charge makes a vaguely all-encompassing gesture with one hand. “Look around you, sir. Phalanx arrived just before you did. They’re doing a full crew change before they have to head for the nuke yard for a restock, so they get priority billing on the shuttle seats.”
“Great. So much to do around here for six hours. Nothing you can do to get me down to Norfolk earlier? I’ll strap myself to a cargo pallet if I have to.”
The staff sergeant consults his terminal screen.
“Nothing open until 1800, sir.”
“Fuck.”
“Tell you what,” he says. “If I have something opening up, I’ll send you an update on your PDP. Best I can do right now, sir.”
“It’ll have to do,” I reply. “Thanks.”
Gateway doesn’t have much to do for people who
have to kill time. There’s a single RecFac on the main concourse, but when I stop by to check it out, even the officers’ section is crowded.
It appears that I’m not the only one waiting for a ride down to Earth. I duck back out of the RecFac and go to one of the chow halls. I’ve been an officer for a year now, and it has taken me this long to reliably steer for the officers’ mess instead of the enlisted mess without having to think about it. Gateway’s officers’ mess is about five times the size of a shipboard one, and the food is served buffet-style. I settle in and head over to the buffet, expecting to see the usual varieties of soy-based garbage we’ve been eating since the exodus, but I’m pleasantly surprised to see reconstituted mashed potatoes, chicken that looks like actual chicken, and three varieties of vegetables. There are even dessert options, something I haven’t seen in a Fleet chow hall in a long time.
“What’s up with the luxury chow?” I ask one of the mess orderlies, who shrugs.
“It’s been getting better. Haven’t served any soy in two months, sir.”
“Outstanding,” I say and heap on another spoonful of mashed potatoes. Then I sit down at a table to message Halley while I’m eating, to let her know that I am safely on Gateway. The bandwidth this close to Earth is good enough for video, and Halley picks up after the third hail. From the background, I can see that I caught her at lunch as well.
“What about it?” she says when I pan my PDP over the plate to show her the stuff on my plate.
“It’s real food,” I say. “Well, sort of. Not as good as what we had before. But edible.”
“Yeah. The chow has improved a lot recently. I see fresh fruit at just about every breakfast now. And real eggs, not the powdered shit.”
“I thought we were broke.”
“That’s what I thought, too. Rumor has it that the Euros and the Aussies have kicked in a bunch of cash to keep the show going. Guess they figured out that if we get our asses kicked up here, they’ll be next.”
“Where are you?” I ask.
“Officers’ mess at Armstrong,” she says. Fleet Station Armstrong is one of the main bases on the moon, and the one with the biggest military spaceport.
“Tell me your leave went through.”
“My leave went through,” she says. “Heading down to Earth tomorrow.”
“My shuttle out is at 1800 tonight. I have to report to Norfolk before I go on leave.”
“You still don’t have your next assignment?” Halley asks.
“Nope. Hope I don’t get to supervise a bunch of bored corporals in the TPU while the Fleet figures out what to do with me.”
“They won’t. You’re a podhead, not a filing clerk.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time I used my podhead training for folding towels.”
“Well, if that’s what happens, then you make sure they’re the most precisely folded towels the TPU has ever seen. Now finish your chow and don’t miss your shuttle. I don’t want to waste a minute of this leave. Not after six months of enforced celibacy.”
“You’re coming in loud and clear, Major,” I say with a smile and sign off.
For once, I get lucky in the game of seat-assignment lotto. Not fifteen minutes after I finish my meal, the PDP in my pocket vibrates. I take it out and look at the screen to see that the transfer station has assigned me a seat on a departing shuttle at 1230. I check my chrono, which shows 12:10. The shuttle leaves from an airlock that’s on the opposite end of the concourse, naturally.
“Always a fly in the soup,” I mutter and shoulder my gear bag for a mad dash through the busy concourse.
The ride down to Earth is smooth and reasonably scenic, and I managed to snag a window seat in the back of the shuttle. Most of the North American continent lies under a hazy smog pall as always, but there are breaks in the clouds here and there, and even the smog can be beautiful in its own way, painted from below as it is by millions of lights. When we descend through the cloud cover, we’re somewhere above the Northeast, just a few hundred miles southeast of Vermont, and I feel a surprising little pang of homesickness when I see the Green Mountains poking out of the haze in the distance. Directly below the shuttle, the supertall high-rise towers of many Category Five PRCs poke out of the haze, collision avoidance beacons blazing on their rooftop masts and painting the smog in flashing streaks of red. Every time I fly over the East Coast on the way into Norfolk, I am reminded just how densely populated this part of the country really is. From the air, the sea of fusion-powered lights stretches for thousands of kilometers. You could probably walk from Miami all the way to Halifax without stepping into a single patch of grass.
Norfolk is a gigantic base, bigger than almost every other military installation we have. Back in the days of the old United States, it was a wet-navy base, but now it’s one of the three main Fleet hubs on Earth, the other two being Great Lakes and San Diego. Whoever decided the locations for the operations hubs of a space-going fleet must have had a lot of nostalgia for ocean ports, even though most of the traffic from the bases goes up into orbit and not out into the ocean. It would have made more sense to put the Fleet bases in the Rockies and ten thousand feet closer to orbit, but this is the military, and making sense is against service tradition.
The shuttle touches down on one of the many landing pads of the air/space field at 1345 hours. I hitch a succession of rides from the flight-ops building to the inner core of the base, where the base command buildings are clustered around a second, smaller airfield. Even through the ever-present smog haze, I smell the ocean just a few blocks away.
Fleet Special Warfare Group Two is headquartered in a small, dingy two-story building that looks like it may have been in service since before there was a NAC Defense Corps. There are no field units quartered here, just the administrative and command elements. The place is lousy with staff officers and high-ranking NCOs wearing mostly service Bravos, the usual staff-duty uniform with slacks and short-sleeve shirt.. I am wearing mine as well, the prescribed uniform for travel and reporting to new commands, but I wear it so rarely that it feels like I’m in a costume.
The commanding officer of Special Warfare Group Two has his office all the way at the end of the building. The door is open, and I peek around the corner to see if the colonel is busy. Colonel Masoud is not wearing his service Bravos. I have never seen him in anything but his faded camouflage CDUs, sleeves crisply rolled and folded without a wrinkle, no accouterments other than his name tape and the gold space special warfare badge. I knew from the message traffic on MilNet he had been bumped in rank since Mars, but this is the first time I’ve seen him with the new rank insignia. I knock on the frame of his open office door, and he looks up from the printout he was reading. I drop my gear bag and snap a salute.
“Captain Grayson reporting as ordered, sir.”
“Come in, Captain,” Colonel Masoud says and nods at the empty chair in front of his desk. “Have a seat.”
“Yes, sir.” I move my gear bag out of the way and sit down as directed. I haven’t seen the major in person since just after the Second Battle of Mars, but he always treats me like I had just been in his office earlier in the day. He doesn’t waste time with perfunctory politeness, and I suspect he doesn’t give a shit whether people like it or not.
“Congratulations on your promotion, Captain,” Colonel Masoud says.
“Thank you, sir. Likewise. You got to skip O-4 altogether?”
“Oh no,” he says. “I was already O-4 once before I had some . . . disagreements with my superiors. They restored that rank after Mars. Then they added a pay grade on top, because there weren’t enough suckers around to compete for this job.”
Special Warfare Group Two has four SOCOM teams under it, and there is only one other special warfare group in the Fleet, which means that Colonel Masoud is now the commanding officer of half the Fleet’s SEALs, Spaceborne Rescuemen, and combat controllers. With the shortage of senior officers in nearly every combat specialty, I suspect that he had that role un
officially already since our massive ass-kicking by the Lankies at the First Battle of Mars and that they merely made his position official and finally gave him the stars and the pay that went with it.
“How are things on Mars?” Colonel Masoud asks. I know that he has a very good picture of what’s going on because he’s a hard-nosed perfectionist, but I humor him anyway.
“Pretty awful,” I say. “We have them contained, and we’re killing them whenever they poke their heads out. But we’re grinding up our gear. And the troops are just as worn out as the ships.”
“Garrison duty is bad for people and machines. But we can’t afford to take the pressure off the Lankies, or we’ll be right back at square one in a year.”
“Yes, sir. Everyone is aware of that. But double deployments are too long out there. People get tired, and then they make mistakes.”
“I’ve argued with command about the length of the rotations, but we just don’t have enough qualified SOCOM people on the roster to allow for six-month tours. Which brings me to your new orders.”
He pulls a printout from the stack of papers on his desk and studies it with a frown. Then he turns toward his terminal and flicks through a few screens.
“You have been assigned to a new ship. It’s classified, so you won’t know the hull number or class until you report to your new duty station. You will, however, be able to deduce something from the fact that your new assignment is special tactics officer.”
The special tactics officer, or STO, is the junior grade officer in charge of a group of combat controllers. To have a whole group of red hats under me, the new ship has to have at least a battalion of embarked SI troops, and more likely a full regiment. That means the classified ship has got to be a supercarrier, the only Fleet unit large enough to embark a full regiment.
“I have too few trained veterans around as it is. I don’t feel particularly happy about having to loan out one of my scarce assets to someone else. But I don’t have the last word on personnel issues around here, even though the plaque on the door says ‘Commanding Officer.’” He shakes his head at the contents of his terminal screen.
