by Marko Kloos
It takes me a few minutes to arrange the screens into my preferred layout and save the setup to my user profile so the other combat controllers who will be cycling through this seat can’t mess with it. The big situational display at the front bulkhead of the CIC shows the plot, Ottawa creeping along a trajectory line to intercept the orbit of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon and location of the biggest Fleet base in the outer solar system. The holotable in the center of the command pit shows the tactical display, a sphere around the ship that shows everything out to a hundred-thousand-kilometer radius. I don’t need the plot on my smaller display—the relative location of the ship in the solar system is of no importance to tactical ops—but I do like to have the tactical display mirrored on my overhead screen, so I set it to duplicate the holotable display. The screens on the sides are for air assets and their inventories, camera feeds, and other nuts-and-bolts stuff that lets me keep an eye on resources. The center screen right in front of me is for my TacLink display, where I will spend most of my time once we have birds in the air and targets to engage.
With the system access afforded by my console, I check out the weapons systems of Ottawa for the first time to see what kind of firepower we’ll be able to call down. Controlling the weapons is the domain of the various weapon officer stations, but I can see the assets we have so I know their status and their availability for orbital strikes. I scroll through the available systems and let out an involuntary low whistle. Ottawa has a dozen ventral rail-gun mounts, each connected to enormous magazines of three hundred rounds per gun. Amidships on the top of the hull, there are missile silos to port and starboard of Ottawa’s dorsal bulge, thirty-two Hades-C guided antiship missiles with thermonuclear warheads on each side. But the nukes aren’t the biggest punch this ship can dish out. That’s the pair of ventrally mounted particle cannons that run almost half the length of the ship and the six Orion III missiles in their armored box launchers. Going over the weapons systems of Ottawa, I know why the SRA got exactly as many ships of this class as the NAC. This ship is nothing like we’ve ever put into space before. In direct combat, it could probably take on the entire remaining Fleet and blow it into stardust. But everything about the Ottawa is clearly designed to kill Lanky seed ships and scrape them off occupied planets, not to take on other human-crewed warships.
As I study the three-dimensional image of the ship on my screen, I am once again struck by how much the shape of the design reminds me of a Lanky seed ship. It doesn’t have the length or sheer mass of a seed ship, but it shares the almost organic, flowing shape of the hull, without a right angle anywhere. It also doesn’t radiate the menace of the flat-black Lanky ships—the hull is painted titanium white with orange-and-blue markers here and there. It’s a pretty ship, as far as a warship can be called that. But it’s undeniably powerful-looking, and after my quick inventory, I know that Ottawa has enough destructive power tucked away under that gracefully flowing white armor to back up that impression. If seed ships are monsters, this thing is a monster killer. And we have three more just like it almost ready for their own shakedown cruises at Daedalus.
We went from an ass-kicking to a stalemate, I think. With more of these, we can finally return the ass-kicking in kind.
If they work as they should, an unbidden voice in my head cautions me. I remember how quickly Agincourt got taken out of the fight three years ago above Mars even though we did everything by the book. That was an expensive beta test for the battleships, and I hope they learned the right lessons from them, because I do not want to find out what it feels like when you launch out of Ottawa in an escape pod, no matter how cushy they made the damn things.
CHAPTER 11
A PLEASANT REUNION
The trip to Fleet Yard Titan takes six weeks from Earth. The running track sandwiched into the space between the nuclear missile silos is exactly one kilometer long. Two days before our arrival at Titan, with Saturn already looming large behind the ship even at low magnification, I have run that kilometer two hundred times, five kilometers per day.
The track would be a thing of luxury on a shore installation. On a warship, it’s an unimaginable opulence because it’s thousands of cubic meters of empty single-use space. It has a firm padded surface and a white line down the middle, and it’s wide enough for two people to run abreast if there’s nobody faster coming up from behind to claim the space. I’m sure there are emergency-use plans for the space when they are needed, but right now it’s just a long ellipse of a passageway, uninterrupted except for a slight narrowing of the track for bulkheads every now and then. It’s air-conditioned and quiet, and the ability to run for almost half a kilometer in a straight line without having to stop or turn alleviates some of the twitches of claustrophobia I usually get on a spaceship, even after years of deployments. It also counteracts the side effects of Ottawa’s officer’s wardroom, which has the best food Halley and I have had in years outside of Chief Kopka’s little restaurant.
In an unusual display of design smarts, the running track is connected to the ship’s main gym, where some motivated SI troops are currently doing weight work on the benches. The weight bars don’t have weights hanging off them—racks full of ten- and twenty-kilo steel plates would be a hazard on a ship that can pull over ten g’s of acceleration, artificial gravity or not—so they are connected to computerized uprights that generate the programmed weight via electromagnetic resistance. It lacks the satisfying feel of lifting real steel, but it’s much better than having to take three-month breaks between lifting routines.
There’s a small vestibule connecting the gym to the running track that’s the only way on and off the track not involving an emergency hatch. I’ve been running with three of my STT sergeants for our regular prebreakfast 5k, and we trot up into the vestibule at the end of our fifth round sweaty, out of breath, and ready for coffee and eggs. Just as we enter the vestibule, the hatch from the gym side opens, and three SI officers step out and fill the space from the other side. We wear PT gear, and the Fleet issues black workout shorts while the SI uses green ones. The workout shirts in both branches are black, with simplified rank symbols on the upper sleeves—one fluorescent horizontal stripe for junior NCOs, two stripes for senior NCOs, one round pip for junior officers, and two for staff officers—to quickly identify pecking orders in interunit PT gaggles. The three SI troopers coming out to use the track all have the same junior officer pip on their sleeves as I do, and I nod at them from my hunched-over position as I catch my breath.
“How’s the weather out today?” one of the SI officers asks. Her voice stirs a faint memory in my brain, and I straighten up to get a better look at her. From the way her eyes widen in surprise, I see that we recognize each other at the same moment.
“Andrew Grayson,” she says. “Son of a bitch.”
“Hansen,” I say. “How have you been?”
When I saw her last, we were both in battle armor and bleeding, a scary, hot summer night almost nine years ago that now feels as distant as if someone else lived through the event. Then-PFC Hansen was one of my squad mates in Bravo Company, 365th Autonomous Infantry Battalion, Territorial Army.
“I’ve been all right,” she says and grins. She has lost the ponytail—in fact, her hair is now a short cut better suited for vacuum-rated battle armor—but she still looks much the same as she did when I first walked into the squad room at Fort Shughart nine years ago, even if her almond-shaped eyes have a few more wrinkles in their corners, and she looks like she’s packed on about five or ten kilos of muscle since then.
“We served together in the old TA,” she tells the officers next to her, and they nod at me. “He was one of my squaddies.”
“Green as a pair of PT shorts,” I confirm.
“Why don’t you head out and get started?” she says. “I’ll catch up with you in a second.”
“Go ahead and hit the showers,” I dismiss the two sergeants behind me, and they nod and step through the hatch into the main gym. Hansen’s t
wo companions walk out onto the track and then trot off for their first counterclockwise round of the ellipse.
“So you’re SI now?” I ask. “And you made officer.”
“Yeah, I got shuffled to the space monkeys during the Mars buildup,” she says. “You know, when they retrained half the HD branch to SI.” She glances at the junior officer pip on her shoulder. “And I think everyone who’s been in for as long as we have is either an officer or dead by now.”
“How’s the shoulder?” I ask. Hansen’s shoulder joint took a round that night in Detroit, and Sergeant Fallon told me in the hospital at Great Lakes afterwards that Hansen’s joint got replaced with an artificial one.
“It’s fine. Works as well as the old one. They could have at least given me a power boost upgrade or something, but no dice.”
“Yeah, I hear you. I missed the perfect opportunity for a cutting-edge knife hand.” I look at my left hand and wiggle my fingers. The three outboard ones will never not feel weird, sort of muted and numb, like a local shot of anesthetic that has almost but not quite worn off. “Got those shot off. By a civilian security cop, if you can believe that. Embarrassing.”
“I’d like to hear the story behind that,” Hansen says. “And whatever happened to you after Detroit. I heard from Sergeant Fallon you got shunted over to the navy, but that’s about it.”
“Let’s catch up,” I suggest. “What’s your current command?”
“I’m the CO of Charlie Company, First Battalion, Seventh SI. What about you?”
“I’m in charge of the special tactics team.”
“Podhead,” she says with a grin. “You couldn’t find yourself a nice console jockey job after that mess in Detroit?”
“I tried. Got bored. Guess I’m not the console jockey type.”
“I guess not.” She looks at her chrono. “Listen, I want to get my laps in before chow and orders, but I’d love to catch up. You on a watch cycle?”
“We make our own team rotation for the CIC seat,” I say. “Everything else is grunt schedule.”
“Let’s sync lunch or something. How about 1145?”
“I can do that. Which wardroom?”
“Where do you usually eat?”
“Flight deck level. But I can come slum in Grunt Country.”
“You’ve got the credentials.” She taps me on the chest with the back of her hand. “Holy shit, I never expected to run into anyone from Bravo/365 again. See you at 1145.”
“Affirmative,” I say, and watch her as she walks out onto the track and starts running. If anything, she’s in better shape than she was in the TA, and she was already lean and mean back then. It’s a strangely elating feeling to run into someone who has been part of my service history almost from the beginning, almost as long as Halley. Maybe that means some of us will make it through this meat grinder after all.
I spend the morning in my office in the SOCOM section, sorting out training schedules and CIC coverage when I’d rather be at the firing range. The higher your rank, the more administrative bullshit gets shoveled onto your plate. I suspect that staff and general officers must have a terminal screen in the head as well so they can respond to administrative messages even when they’re on the throne.
At 1130, my reminder alert goes off, and I shut down my terminal screen and check myself in the mirror before heading out to Grunt Country.
In the SI officer’s wardroom, everyone is wearing the standard SI battle tunic with its distinctive camo pattern, and when I walk into the wardroom, I stick out right away as the only person wearing a Fleet uniform. The blueberry suit is as different from the SI cammies as you can get. At least the old Fleet cammies had roughly the same cut as their SI counterparts, even if the camo pattern was different. But the new suits are radically something else, and as I walk up to the buffet and put food on my mess tray, I feel like some boot camp recruit who mistakenly ended up in formation wearing his PT outfit while everyone else is in battle dress. I don’t see Hansen at any of the tables yet, so I sit down at an empty one and pick at my salad while I wait.
Hansen comes in a few minutes later, wearing faded but crisp-looking SI cammies, sleeves folded tightly and neatly over her biceps in the traditional way the SI maintained from the time they were called marines. Hansen spots me and nods. Then she gets her food and comes over to join me.
“I just had a flashback to that fracas in the enlisted chow hall back at Shughart,” I say when she sits down. “Remember that one?”
She chuckles.
“Oh yeah. When those marines tried to cut into line at chow. That was the most fun meal I’ve had in the TA. Took half a platoon of MPs to get that place under control once the mashed potatoes started flying.”
Hansen’s tunic bears captain’s rank insignia and a combat-drop badge in gold, just like my new Fleet uniform. She looks like a proper grunt, while I still think the new uniform makes me look like an actor pretending to be a starship captain on a second-rate Network show.
“And then the sergeant major chewed out the grunts who were there but didn’t fight,” I say, and we both grin.
“Never thought I’d trade in that green beret for a maroon one,” Hansen says.
“Do you miss being HD?”
“Nope. That’s why I jumped on the offer when they asked for volunteers for the SI at first. Three months later, I got out of SOI on Luna, and then it was no longer optional. They just went through the HD battalions and pulled whoever they needed. Here are your new orders, have fun in space. At least I got the early volunteer perks.”
“As much fun as we made of the space monkeys, and now we’re both here,” I say.
“After you were gone, things turned to shit. Not all at once, but gradually. We just ended up getting more and more riot alerts. Three a year, then one every other month, then four or five in a month. And taking a beating all the while. That was right before the PRCs turned into a raging garbage fire. You have no idea what it was like in the end. I figured space couldn’t be half as dangerous, even with the Lankies.”
“I have a good idea,” I reply. “I did eighteen months with the Lazarus Brigade as an instructor. Loan from the Fleet, to get their own Combat Controller School off the ground.”
“Ouch,” Hansen says. “You couldn’t get me back into a PRC at this point. Not if you promised me a Medal of Honor and a three-story house in a gated ’burb for it. Give me the choice between dropping into a nonpacified PRC or onto a Lanky-controlled moon, I’ll take my chances with the Lankies.”
We eat our food and trade rough timelines of our service histories from the last eight years. Hansen switched to the SI only three years ago as a sergeant first class, and one of her volunteer perks was her pick between a senior NCO slot or an officer commission. She went the brass road, and it turns out we both made captain rank at roughly the same time, six months ago. In peacetime, turning an NCO rank into O-3 within three years was impossible, with so many troops choosing to remain in the corps and competing for limited billets. But the corps was bled white after the Lankies took Mars, and trained personnel were suddenly hard to come by. It takes three months to turn a raw civilian into a soldier, and then three more to make him or her a basically competent fire team member. It takes years to train a combat controller or Spaceborne Rescue specialist. You can train a new rifleman or build a new drop ship much more quickly than you can replace an experienced infantry company commander or drop ship pilot. Hansen, Halley, and I got pushed up the ladder quickly because too many of the people above us had fallen off.
“So you’re married to your boot camp girlfriend,” Hansen says with a grin when I get to that part of my own narrative. “I’ve heard of that happening, but I’ve never known anyone who’s done it.”
“She’s on Ottawa, too,” I say. “She’s the XO of one of the drop ship squadrons.”
“I am not surprised. It’s like they put all the seasoned people they had left onto their shiny new toy. The Seventh SI is one of the few regiments left
that isn’t mostly green troops fresh out of SOI.”
“You were at Mars,” I say, and she nods.
“LZ Yellow. The Seventh did all right. Compared to what some of the other regiments suffered, I mean. We had three hundred dead, half the rest wounded. I had a platoon in Delta company. Held the line and gained fifteen klicks of ground before the emergency dustoff.”
She stabs her next piece of chicken with a lot more force than necessary.
“God, we were feeling so fucking good about ourselves. We were pushing them back. We were killing them by the dozens. We were gaining ground. Until that TacLink screen went nuts with orange icons. On our flanks. In the rear, the parts we thought we had already cleared. But you know the story.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Same at LZ Red. They were dragging out the carrot so we’d stick our heads far enough out of the LZ. And then they had us in the bag.”
Hansen picks up the cup of bug juice next to her plate and downs about half of it in what seems like one gulp.
“Drop ships and close air saved our asses on the retreat,” she continues. “They were piling Lanky bodies all around us. At some point, we had the whole regiment in a bubble half a klick across, defending in all directions. And the drop ships—I’ve never seen anything like it, not in the PRCs, nowhere. They used everything on the external racks, shot every last round out of their cannons, and put down their birds a hundred meters in front of advancing Lankies to pick up platoons without even putting skids into the dirt. And most of us got off. None of the drop ship jocks in that squadron will ever have to buy drinks again as long as anyone from the Seventh SI is in the same room.”
The Battle of Mars is technically the Second Battle of Mars, because the first one took place when the Lankies came in four years ago and wiped out the colony along with most of the Earth fleets. But whenever someone in the corps talks about Mars these days, it’s shorthand for the battle that took place a year later, the combined assault on the Lankies with everything the Earth’s alliances could throw at them—Operation Invictus. It has become the defining landmark of our service histories, the one big operation where almost everyone in the spacebound branches of the corps participated. It’s also a demarcation line between the veterans and the untested. If you don’t have the ribbon for Mars on your Class A smock, the simple orange-red one with the three white stripes down the middle, you are green regardless of what rank you wear. You may be a sergeant or a first lieutenant, and you may have even pulled a garrison deployment above the nuked remains of the battlefields on Mars, but if you got out of your tech school or the School of Infantry even a day after that battle, you have not seen real combat.
