by Marko Kloos
I hold out my left hand and wiggle my fingers. The three leftmost ones are very well-constructed artificial digits, but under the light of the CO’s day cabin, they look a little off. I know they’ll never feel normal again. It’ll always be like someone coated them lightly in liquid wound dressing.
Colonel Yamin says nothing for a little while. She just studies me with those hazel eyes of hers. I had the thought when I first met her on Phalanx three years ago, but it pops up in my head again—she looks remarkably like an older version of Halley. It occurs to me that I keep comparing other women to my wife, the steadiest and most reliable benchmark I have in my life.
“There are so few of us left,” she says finally, in a soft voice. “So few that made it all the way through the grinder. SI or Fleet. My brother would be a major by now. Maybe an XO on a frigate somewhere. The things they make us give up . . .”
She sighs and visibly pulls herself together. Then she takes the pistol off the desk and puts it on a shelf behind her.
“I understand your points. But I can’t overlook your intentional violation of safety regs on my ship, Captain.”
I steel myself for what she’s about to say next. I can only hope that the brig has decently comfortable bunks. Maybe I’ll get to trade the captain’s pips for enlisted stripes again.
“However, I will not keelhaul a decorated combat veteran,” she continues. “Not for two pounds of polymer and steel stowed safely in a locker. I’m giving you nonjudicial punishment. Forfeiture of three months’ base pay, and a reprimand in your personnel file. And your alcohol allowance is canceled for the rest of the deployment. Are you appealing this NJP?”
My head feels light with relief for a moment.
“No, ma’am,” I reply. “I accept the punishment.”
“Very well,” Colonel Yamin says. “I will inform the master-at-arms. And don’t give them a reason to haul you in here again. You just used your one goodwill credit with me. Don’t fuck it up.”
“Understood, ma’am.”
“Dismissed, Captain.”
Well beyond my expectation, I leave the CO’s day cabin without handcuffs shackling my wrists and still wearing O-3 rank on my uniform. I’ve still not entirely absolved the colonel for siding with the renegade fleet four years ago, but for the first time, I find myself conceding that people like Captain Beals may be the exception rather than the rule among the renegades.
CHAPTER 12
EXOS
We dock at the Titan fleet yard two days later, after six weeks of riding the shortest trajectory to Saturn. Despite the high-energy run, our deuterium is still at 85 percent when we dock at Titan, which means that Ottawa has by far the biggest fuel capacity of any ship in the Fleet. Everything about this thing is built for the purpose of long, autonomous deep-space patrols without the need for tagging along a supporting task group.
The fleet yard is not a regular space station, so there are no facilities for off-duty loafing, no RecFacs or other amusements. We don’t even leave the ship. Our regular watch and training cycle continues while Ottawa tops off her tanks and takes on more supplies and equipment for whatever we’re about to do next. I know we’re not heading back to Earth yet because we’ve only been in space for six weeks, but if they intend to see how far an Avenger-class can go on a single load of fuel, this deployment may turn out longer than even the pessimists are anticipating.
On our second day in the dock at Titan, the entire special tactics team is scheduled for a block of training time on the flight deck. The schedule item comes from the XO, but it’s low on detail when I try to figure out what we’ll be doing down there. All it says is “Technical Familiarization,” so I suspect they have some new and shiny gear for us to check out. The dress for the training block is specified as full battle armor. I send the duty roster update to all STT members and tromp down to the flight deck in my armor when the time comes.
“That is some science fiction shit right there,” Lieutenant Brown comments wryly when he sees what’s waiting for us lined up in the middle of the flight deck. A bunch of civvie techs and some Fleet wrench spinners in working coveralls are swarming around a dozen machines that look like what would happen if a power loader could mate with a light armored vehicle. They are heavily beefed up exoskeletons, standing about three meters tall, painted in the same titanium white and orange hi-viz pattern as the ship and its drop ship complement. The Fleet officer in charge of this training block is a captain from the logistics and supply group.
“Welcome, gentlemen,” he says to us when we have gathered in front of the semicircle formed by the dozen exoskeletons on the flight deck. “You are here to get your basic familiarization training for the XM-5500 power amplification combat system. The Seventh SI Regiment has been picked as a field-test unit for these babies, and you as the supporting special tactics team will have to be familiar with the systems in case you ever have to use one.”
He points at one of the exoskeletons behind us.
“If the test goes as the tech division hopes it will, the SI companies will see their fourth platoons turned into heavy-weapons platoons, each equipped with four of these.”
There’s some incredulous grumbling in our group.
“Four exos to replace thirty-six grunts with rifles and rocket launchers,” one of my Spaceborne Rescue sergeants says. “Sir, we’ve tried going the mech route before. Years ago. They suck in combat.”
“The mech prototypes didn’t fare well against human opposition,” the civilian tech next to the logistics captain says. He has a Fleet access card clipped to his white coveralls that has the name “HIGGINS” on it. “That’s true. They were too tall and obvious on the battlefield.”
“Missile magnets,” the sergeant adds. “You couldn’t go prone in them, and they had a shitload of trouble on uneven terrain.”
“These aren’t the old mech prototypes,” the civvie tech says. “These are much smaller, more power-efficient, and built for a different job. They’re for fighting Lankies, not people.”
He walks over to the nearest exoskeleton and pats the frame with one hand.
“Titanium and carbon fiber laminates. They weigh a third of what the old mech prototypes weighed, but they can lift almost as much weight. We figured that no amount of armor or shock resistance will stand up to a Lanky in direct-contact CQB, so we didn’t even try. It’s designed as a lightweight force amplifier, not a walking tank. You’ll be able to run five times faster and lift twenty times more than you could in your battle armor alone. You’ll have four times the oxygen endurance and a built-in power source to keep your suit topped off. And you can carry a lot more bang.”
He points at the arms of the exoskeleton and taps the underside of the forearm.
“Standard rail mount for crew-served weapons. We designed self-contained pods for weapons and ammunition, and the loadout can be changed in five minutes as needed. And fully loaded and with troopers in them, they are still light enough that four of them fit into one drop ship.”
Inside the semicircle of exoskeletons, there are various weapon and gear pods lined up in a row, and Mr. Higgins walks down the line and points out each one in turn. It’s clear that he is fully versed in military hardware and obviously a defense R&D contractor.
“We had to make some concessions to portability, but most of the heavy weapons used by the SI are readily adaptable to pod configurations. Here we have your standard twenty-five-millimeter autocannon. We had to shorten the barrel a bit to make space for the ammo cassette and still remain within the pod’s size limit, but it’s not going to make a difference to terminal performance at the ranges you typically engage Lankies while on foot.”
“How many rounds in the cassette?” Lieutenant Brown asks.
“Twenty-four. I know that’s a downgrade from the standard hundred-round cassette the crew-served versions have, but this one doesn’t need a three-man crew. Standard ammo load will be twelve silver bullets, twelve high-explosive dual purpose. You can switc
h the feed on the fly, just like on the crew-served version.”
Now the murmurs among the STT troopers sound approving. Grunts love their guns, and the prospect of being able to carry around vehicle-grade firepower strapped underneath your forearm makes those exoskeletons look a lot less dumb than they did just a few minutes ago.
“We also modified the MARS for use with an automatic loader,” Mr. Higgins continues as he moves on to the next pod, which has the unmistakable blunt muzzle of a MARS unguided rocket launcher sticking out of its streamlined nose. “Because of the size of the rockets, you only get three shots, one in the tube and two in the underbarrel magazine. On the plus side, the loader is really fast, so the reload time is two and a half seconds.”
The civvie tech goes through all the other pod options laid out in front of us. There are some that sound useful, like an enhanced sensor and designator pod that would increase my reach for direct target marking fourfold over the designator package built into my armor. There’s a small-caliber rotary cannon complete with its own power source and a twenty-five-hundred-round magazine of caseless ammunition, a forty-millimeter automatic grenade launcher like the ones mounted underneath our M-66 rifles but with higher-pressure propellant charges for more range, and even a pod that fires fifty-meter bursts of flammable gel that burns at a thousand degrees once it leaves the muzzle. Most of the pods seem to be more proof of concept than operationally viable loadouts. I can’t see myself trying to take on a squad of infantry with a minigun pod mounted to a three-meter-tall exoskeleton that can’t go prone or use anything smaller than a single-story building as cover. I would get off maybe half the magazine in the pod before someone dropped an antiarmor missile on me or shot me out of the exo frame with rifle grenades.
After the show-and-tell, we get to try the exoskeletons out. The techs and instructors show us how to climb up into the frame, which is made to interface with standard battle armor. The PACS controls are as simple as they could be. There are handgrips inside of stabilizer sleeves on the lower arms of the PACS, and I stick my arms into the sleeves and grasp the control grips. The sleeve senses the position of my hand and the pressure I put on the sticks, and the articulated metal fingers on the end of each exo arm replicate my movement. I make sure I have enough clearance to either side and take a few cautious steps forward. Exoskeleton tech must have improved a great deal in the last few years, because unlike the power loaders I’ve tried before, there’s almost no lag between my movement and the suit’s translation of it. The suit probably weighs well over a metric ton, but it feels almost weightless because the high-powered servos are doing all the work. One of the techs keeps pace with me as I walk the PACS down the flight deck slowly. We are on the centerline of the deck, and the nearest aircraft are lined up fifty meters away, so we have a lot of free space in case one of us goofs up with the suit.
“How does it feel?” the tech asks. “It looks like you’ve figured it all out already.”
“Not so different from a power loader,” I say. “Feels better, though. Much smoother.”
“You’re fully gyro-stabilized. The suit will stay upright unless you tell it not to. Try stepping up your pace. Just stay on the centerline.”
I take slightly longer steps, then start striding. The movement is so effortless that it feels like I could run without a problem, so after twenty or thirty meters of striding, I break into a light trot, and the PACS obliges. It’s like all my muscles are suddenly supercharged.
“There you go,” the tech shouts behind me, already left in the dust by the speed I’ve put on just with a careful trot. I can see maintenance crews and pilots turning and watching me from the sidelines as I pick up speed and break into a full run. The suit feels like it’s barely there. I make it a hundred meters down the flight deck in what feels like no time at all. Then I slow down and come to a stop before I get too close to the anxious-looking Shrike mechanics and their ships lined up at the stern end of the deck.
I turn around and give a thumbs-up to my group, and the suit replicates the gesture. Two more troopers have mounted their exos and are now walking down the flight deck in my direction, in the same careful way I started my own jaunt. I go down on one knee, and the PACS lowers itself and plants its knee joint onto the deck. There’s no weapon pod attached to either of the exo’s forearms, but I extend my right hand anyway as if I had a gun to aim. The PACS tracks and copies my movement smoothly. Set up like this, it feels solid enough to make a very stable gun platform.
I get up and stride back to the now-broken semicircle of exoskeletons. Halfway back, I pass my sergeants in their own PACS, both of them with big grins on their faces. I walk back into the semicircle and park the PACS where I had started it.
“What do you think?” Mr. Higgins asks.
“That’s some really nice gear,” I say.
“Run up to eighty klicks per hour, lift a ton and a quarter, jump five meters high. If we’d had the funding and the R&D for these things nine years ago, things would have been different with the Lankies.”
“I don’t know about that.” I hit the quick-release on the harness buckle and step back down onto the deck. “With a thousand of these per regiment, maybe. I’m not sure that four per company is going to turn them from ‘nice to have’ into ‘essential.’”
I look back at the PACS and pat the ballistic liner on the inside.
“I still want one, though,” I say, and Mr. Higgins grins.
After a lecture and demonstration of the suit’s full capabilities by one of the engineers, we spend another hour with the PACS, running up and down the flight deck and using dummy gun pods to try out the targeting systems. Even with a hundred-kilo pod attached to the arm of the exoskeleton, it doesn’t feel encumbering. The servos are powerful and almost dead silent, which makes the PACS feel more like a physical extension of my body than any other power augmentation gear I’ve tried. Unlike our battle armor, which is only power-assisted, the PACS can use its servos autonomously. There’s a gun-calibration target painted on one of the flight deck bulkheads so the drop ship computers can zero their aim, and I tell the dummy gun on my arm to fire a simulated three-round burst at each as fast as possible. When I let the aim go automatic, the PACS swings my arm to the first target, the second, and then the third, all in under two seconds. The techs tell us that you can even set a course on your TacLink screen and let the suit walk it on autopilot in an emergency.
“In an emergency,” Lieutenant Brown says and winks at me. “The second the grunts get wind of that feature, they’ll be taking long naps on patrol.”
“Shit, I would,” I reply. “You can always have the computer wake you up if anything pops up on TacLink.”
When our orientation session ends, I leave the PACS behind with some reluctance. For years we’ve been fighting the Lankies mostly as infantry on foot because we didn’t have a deployable mobile armor system that’s small enough to fit into a drop ship and big enough to be useful for anything. These aren’t as capable as a mule or that awesome little Eurocorps recon vehicle, but they’re much better than walking into battle on your own two feet and hauling just what your armor’s passive power assist can bear. These PACS are evidence that R&D is still on the ball and trying to come up with better ways to kill Lankies, but part of me is a little pissed off that we didn’t have these three years ago at Mars already. Even with the immediate threat of extinction, government bureaucracies grind as slowly as ever. If we could put the people in charge of budgets and equipment purchases into battle armor and make them go on every combat drop with us, it would take just a week or two for new gear to be approved and issued.
CHAPTER 13
EASY MODE
“Attention, all hands. This is the CO.”
I’m just finished with my morning ablutions when the voice of Colonel Yamin comes over the 1MC, and I sit down in front of my terminal screen to dry my face and listen to what the skipper has to announce. We’re three days out of Fleet Yard Titan with full tanks and s
upplies, and the rumor mill has been abuzz since we undocked. Halley is predicting a high-speed run back to Earth, but I don’t think we would have taken on fuel and consumables at Titan just for a run back home. This ship has immensely long legs, and they’ll want to see how far they can stretch them.
“The ship has taken on provisions and reactor fuel for the next stage of our shakedown cruise. We will proceed back toward the inner system at full military power to stress-test the reactors and verify fuel consumption estimates. Providing we don’t have a reason to head home for repairs, we will then test the Alcubierre drive by making a transition out of system.”
My stomach sinks a little at the news. We’ve had ships out of system a few times in the last three years to scout out and reestablish contact with some of the colonies we knew to be safe before the Battle of Mars. But those expeditions have been high-risk missions due to the chance of an extrasolar encounter with the Lankies without our best weapons. The first-generation Orions don’t fit into any ships and can’t make Alcubierre transitions under tow, and Arkhangelsk couldn’t leave the system because she has been the cornerstone of our planetary defense network until now.
“To test this ship’s long-range capabilities, we are making a transition to the Leonidas system,” the CO continues. “Once we arrive in-system, we will commence a planetary assault exercise. We will enter Leonidas, scout the system, proceed to the Arcadia colony, and execute a by-the-book practice assault on simulated enemy positions in and around Arcadia City.”
I finish drying my face and put the towel aside, trying to parse the information I just heard.
Leonidas.
“You have got to be joking,” I say out loud into the empty stateroom.
It makes sense from a technical perspective—Leonidas is known to be a safe colony, and it’s the furthest Alcubierre trip we can make by a long shot—but the prospect of returning to the place where I lost a quarter of my platoon and nearly became a widower fills me with immediate dread. Three years ago, it was under control of the renegade NAC government, and I was part of the commando mission that stealthed into Leonidas to reclaim our assets. As beautiful as Arcadia is, I had hoped never to see that place again in person. The nuclear demolition charge the SEALs set off at the main fusion plant outside of Arcadia City was small, only a kiloton and a half, but the surface detonation was dirty, and the radiation levels in the city will be back to normal in about a hundred years.
