by Marko Kloos
BY MARKO KLOOS
Frontlines
Terms of Enlistment
Lines of Departure
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.
Text copyright © 2015 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: 9781477828311
ISBN-10: 1477828311
Cover design by Marc Simonetti
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014954221
For Robin—the Halley to my Grayson, the peanut butter to my jelly, and the center of it all, now and forever.
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1 FOMALHAUT B
CHAPTER 2 NEW SVALBARD
CHAPTER 3 BALANCING THE SCALES
CHAPTER 4 FROM FLAME TO FIRE
CHAPTER 5 CULTURAL EXCHANGE
CHAPTER 6 DOORWAY HOME
CHAPTER 7 PLANETARY GRAVEYARD
CHAPTER 8 A FROSTY RECEPTION
CHAPTER 9 YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN
CHAPTER 10 THE TOUGHEST GUY ON THE BLOCK
CHAPTER 11 EXECUTING ORDERS
CHAPTER 12 FULL SPEED ASTERN
CHAPTER 13 WE TAKE WHAT WE’RE SERVED
CHAPTER 14 SKIRTING THE PICKET
CHAPTER 15 LIKE IN OLD CAPITALIST MILITARY FILM
CHAPTER 16 LITTLE COGS IN THE GRINDER
CHAPTER 17 RED ROUTE ONE
CHAPTER 18 MINNOWS AND SHARKS
CHAPTER 19 CATCHING UP
CHAPTER 20 EXODUS
CHAPTER 21 CLEARED FOR TRANSITION
CHAPTER 22 BATTLE PLAN ROMEO
CHAPTER 23 THIS MAY BE THE DAY
CHAPTER 24 THE BATTLE OF EARTH
CHAPTER 25 THE SECOND BATTLE OF DETROIT
CHAPTER 26 LAZARUS BRIGADE
EPILOUGE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Earth. I never thought I’d ever miss the place.
Granted, it wasn’t much near the end. Little blue ball of dirt and mostly water, in a corner of a small galaxy at the ass end of the universe. Five billion years it spun around in space, and then we managed to fill it up with a hundred billion of our species in just fifty millennia. Spoiled water, lousy air, mostly dead oceans. And what we didn’t ruin, we fought over incessantly, killing each other by the millions over the centuries as our technology far outpaced our ability to keep the vestigial lizard parts of our brains in check.
No, Earth wasn’t much when I left it. But it was home.
Five years in the corps, hopping all over settled space, dozens of light-years away from my home planet, and I never once felt homesick. That was because somewhere in the back of my mind, I always felt secure in the knowledge that Earth was still out there, back where I left it, still orbiting the sun once every 365 days, still crawling with humans, still sprawling with cities full of life-forms who look and act like I do.
Now I’m not sure anymore.
The Lankies showed up and took Mars, our oldest and biggest colony in space. Most of us on New Svalbard have seen at least some of the combat footage and sensor data. Twenty alien seed ships all in orbit at once, blowing our fleet into debris and landing thousands of colony pods, dozens of Lanky settler-scouts in each. Lanky nerve gas raining down on the cities, dispassionate wholesale extermination, scraping a nuisance species off the new real estate before moving in. Every ship capable of spaceflight loading up refugees and fleeing the planet at full burn, only to get blown to shrapnel by the Lanky blockade and their orbital minefields. Those who could ran, and most of them died. Those who stayed died just the same.
The last five years were just a warm-up for them. They were testing our capabilities, probing our defenses, gauging our reactions. Playing with their food.
No, things are not looking good for humanity. The theoretical worst-case scenario has finally caught up with us. If things don’t turn around, we are looking at the extinction of our species within the next year, maybe two.
But we are humans. We are obstinate, stubborn, belligerent, unreasonable. And we are doing what most sentient creatures do when you corner them and leave them no avenue of escape: We bare our claws and our teeth, and we go on the attack.
A combined NAC/SRA refugee force arrived at New Svalbard two weeks ago, with most of their troop complements and drop ships lost in the Battle of Mars and the many skirmishes that took place concurrently all over the solar system. There were two carriers in the refugee fleet—the SRA’s Minsk and the NAC’s Regulus. The SRA carrier, normally embarking a full regiment of marines, had a reinforced company left. The Regulus, one of the NAC’s six supercarriers, hadn’t fared much better, having lost most of its regiment of Spaceborne Infantry.
For whatever reason, the Lanky seed ship we destroyed in the Fomalhaut system by flying a water-laden freighter into it never deployed defensive minefields around the SRA colony moon before they set out for New Svalbard. They arrived in orbit, dumped their colony pods onto the surface, and went straight after the single Russian unit in orbit, the hapless cruiser whose futile run and subsequent destruction alerted us to the Lanky presence in the system to begin with. Now the SRA moon is crawling with Lanky settlers, but they have no overhead defenses, and no seed ship in orbit to keep our ships away. We can finally fight them on somewhat even terms, with the airpower and spaceborne artillery we’re usually denied on Lanky worlds.
There are survivors all over the SRA colony. The Lankies have been on the surface for less than three weeks, and while they’ve methodically wrecked the human infrastructure on the moon wherever they went, they didn’t use the nerve-gas pods they usually employ when scraping us off one of our colonies. There are protective shelters all over the place where people holed up, and their small garrison of SRA marines has even been able to stage hit-and-run raids on the invaders. Our recon flights just prior to the assault made radio contact with dozens of scattered groups of SRA civilians and military personnel. So the brass from both sides got together and decided to stage a raid. The SRA, short on marines but with plenty of drop ships, would supply most of the ships. The NAC, with many infantry troops but few drop ships, would contribute most of the fighting men and women on the ground. Amazingly, everyone agreed. More amazingly, we were able to plan a combined-arms operation across two blocs in just a week and a half, with no common standards in armament, equipment, or logistics.
So now, two weeks after the refugee fleet showed up above New Svalbard, we are on the way to the SRA moon in the Fomalhaut system, to rescue the surviving SRA settlers and garrison troops, kill as many of the Lankies as we can, and get out before another seed ship pops up in the system.
That’s the battle plan, anyway, but after five years of operational clusterfucks and near misses, I know for sure that no plan ever survives first contact with the enemy.
CHAPTER 1
“You look like insect,” Dmitry says from the jump seat across the aisle. “Big, ugly, imperialist insect.”
“You people are experts on ugly,” I reply, and look around.
I’m in the cargo hold of a Russian Akula-class drop ship, which is a place I never thought I’d find myself, at least not whi
le fully armed and in battle rattle. The weirdness of the last few days has reached new, previously unexplored levels of weird. In the cargo compartment with me is a mixed platoon of SRA marines and NAC Spaceborne Infantry, shoulder to shoulder, everyone armed to the teeth and ready for war. Just a month ago, all of us sharing such tight quarters with so many weapons would have resulted in a short, violent shoot-out and a lot of dead bodies. Now we all ride the battle taxi together, our strange new alliance glued together by sheer necessity.
Our drop-ship designers don’t spend much thought on making the Wasps and Dragonflies pretty, but it seems like the Russians go out of their way to avoid any design touch that might be thought of as aesthetically pleasing. Our drop ships look like the utilitarian war machines they are. The Russian bird looks like a crude piece of heavy construction gear. I can’t help but marvel at the efficiency of the design, however. Our jump seats have single-point swivel mounts with shock absorbers. Theirs are just strong, free-swinging webbing—just as shock-absorbent as ours and probably twenty times cheaper. And whatever their looks, I know that these Russian drop ships can bring down a world of hurt on whoever is on the wrong end of their guns.
“How much longer to the drop zone?” I ask Dmitry. He checks his display and shrugs.
“Eighteen, nineteen minutes. You lean back, take nap.” Then he puts the back of his helmet against the bulkhead behind him, his expression one of mild boredom.
Dmitry is one of my SRA counterparts, a Russian combat controller. We’ve had a few days to get to know each other on the way to this hot and dusty moon around Fomalhaut b, and Dmitry is not at all like the stereotypical Russian grunt. He’s not the size of a battle tank, and he doesn’t swill vodka or talk lovingly to his heavy weaponry. He doesn’t even have a buzz cut. Instead, Dmitry is a rather short guy, just barely taller than Sergeant Fallon, and he has the square jaw and chiseled good looks of a fashion model. His hair is an unruly mop that would be over regulation length in the SI, and he is soft-spoken instead of loud and boisterous. In short, he’s pretty much the polar opposite of the stereotype I had in my head. In the last few weeks, I’ve had a lot of opportunities to adjust my old preconceptions.
I toggle through my available comms circuits and select the top-level tactical channel.
“Regulus TacOps, this is Tailpipe One. Request final comms and telemetry check.”
“Tailpipe One, TacOps,” the reply comes. “You’re five by five on data and comms. Good luck, and good hunting.”
“TacOps, copy that.” I bring up the data feed from Regulus’s TacOps center, where the ground-pounder brass and the carrier’s air-group commander are coordinating the NAC assets about to drop onto a Lanky-controlled moon.
The data feed from Regulus shows the eight drop ships of the first-wave spearhead in a V-shaped formation, streaking into atmosphere from high orbit without any opposition.
I’m going with the first wave, which is made up of SRA drop ships, and I’m the ground liaison for the NAC strike force because I’m one of only two combat controllers in this system right now.
Our atmospheric entry is marked by the usual bumping and buffeting. The armored marines in the cargo hold sway in their seats a little in time with the shuddering of the drop ship. I do one last check of the tactical situation in orbit, still amazed to see some of our most valuable fleet units flying close formation with ships they would have tried to blow out of space a few weeks ago.
Three minutes before Dmitry’s predicted time-on-target, the drop ship banks sharply to the left. A few moments later, I can hear the thumping sound of ordnance leaving the external racks, and then the autocannons on the side of the hull start thundering. The SRA birds have bigger cannons than ours do, but they fire at a slower rate. I can feel the concussions from the muzzle blasts transmit through the hull, something I’ve never felt in our Wasps or Dragonflies. This is a month for new experiences, it seems.
“Kuzka’s mother!”
The shipboard comms blurt out a staccato burst of terse Russian from the pilot that my suit’s universal translator software helpfully translates for me. It doesn’t do well with idioms. I look at Dmitry and point to my ear.
“It means to teach someone hard lesson,” Dmitry says.
All around me, the SRA troopers ready their weapons, so I do likewise. In Bravo kit, I carry the big and heavy M-80 rifle, and twenty-five rounds in quick-release loops on my battle armor. I work the release latch for the M-80’s breech and verify that the brass bases of two armor-piercing rounds are capping the chambers. The computer keeps track of my weapon’s loading status, of course, but no combat grunt with any experience at all ever fully trusts a silicon brain when it comes to life-and-death matters.
The Russian ship changes course a few times, each turn punctuated by bursts of cannon fire or missile launches. The ordnance on a drop ship is for fire support, and it’s not good practice to use most of it up before the grunts hit the dirt, but then the ship tilts sharply upward into a hover, the tail ramp starts opening, and I see why we’re coming in shooting.
“Yóbanny v rot!” one of the Russian marines next to me says, and I have a good idea what it means even without my translator, which merely renders the statement as “Strong profanity.”
Outside, the landing strip for the SRA colony’s air base stretches out into the distance behind the drop ship’s tail boom, and scattered on and near the dirty gray asphalt are the massive bodies of several Lankies, some still smoldering from whatever hit them. I don’t have very much time to observe the scenery as the drop ship puts its skids on the ground and the deployment light over the tail ramp jumps from red to green. We unbuckle, I follow the SRA grunts out of the cargo hold and down the ramp at a run, and I’m back in combat.
“Hurry, hurry, hurry!” the SRA officer in the lead shouts as we thunder down the ramp. In reality, he’s saying something in Russian, of course, but my suit is giving me the closest approximate translation.
The SRA marines work like a well-oiled machine of which I am no part. They take up a standard covering formation as the drop ship dusts off again behind us, engines screaming their banshee wail, sixty tons of laminate steel and weaponry put together into a hulking shape that looks like it shouldn’t be able to fly at all. The drop ship isn’t a hundred meters off the ground when it pivots around and opens fire with its cannon again. Blind without any TacLink information, I have to rely on my own suit’s sensors and my eyes and ears. I look downrange to see where the drop ship is firing, but I can’t see what they’re hitting. I do, however, hear the unearthly wail of a stricken Lanky, a sound that has followed me in many dreams over the last few years. Then I see the Lanky appearing behind a structure two hundred meters away, limbs flailing, trying to get out of the hail pouring from the drop ship’s heavy-caliber autocannons. As big and formidable as they are, their size makes them excellent targets for our air support. For the first time, we are fighting them with all the air and space power at our disposal, and that is making all the difference.
Overhead, I hear a missile coming off the ordnance rack of our ride. It streaks across the distance in a flash and tears into the Lanky’s midsection, blowing it off its feet in a tangle of spindly limbs. The SRA marines around me holler their approval.
The SRA architecture on the ground is almost as sturdy as the housing in New Longyearbyen, but for different reasons. The SRA moon is a hot, dusty, rocky place, much closer to Fomalhaut’s sun than our little ice moon. The squat bunker-like buildings here must be even sturdier than they look, because I can’t see much destruction in this settlement despite the fact that the place has been under Lanky management for a few weeks. They usually gas the settlements first and then dismantle the terraforming infrastructure before taking down our settlements. From the data my suit delivers, it looks like they’ve not even gotten around to step one yet. The atmosphere down here is perfectly normal. No biohazards, no ChemWar alerts. I could pop my helmet off and breathe fresh air if I wanted.
In the distance, on the other side of the settlement, tracers and missile-exhaust trails mark the arrival of the SRA attack birds that have been escorting us into the LZ. I hear the explosions from their ordnance rolling across town, followed by the unnerving wail of stricken Lankies.
The Russians set up a perimeter, guns and rocket launchers at the ready, calling out threat vectors and directions to each other. I fire up all the active stuff in my suit and check the situation. One drop ship overhead, three on the ground, four more about to land. The next NAC unit is claiming a patch of ground on the other side of the garrison town. Each of our SI platoons has at least one SRA marine as a liaison, to make sure that the local defenders don’t start blowing away the people that came to rescue them.
“Air-defense network is not active,” Dmitry tells me over our top-level comms circuit. “Is out of commission. They broke radar, lidar, everything that puts out radiation.”
Our scouting runs from orbit indicated as much, but the brass didn’t want to risk a bunch of drop ships getting blown out of the sky by automated defenses primed to shoot at anything without SRA friend-or-foe transponders, which is why the first wave consists solely of SRA drop ships, carrying mostly NAC infantry in their holds. Now that we’re on the ground, I can call in the NAC hardware.
“Regulus TacOps, Tailpipe One. Boots on the ground, landing zone is crawling with hostiles. Requesting close air support for a sweep north of the LZ.”
“Tailpipe One, TacOps. Copy that. Close air inbound, ETA ten minutes. Call sign is Hammer.”
“Hammer flight inbound, ETA one-zero minutes,” I confirm. The last word almost gets drowned out by the staccato of the machine cannon on the Akula drop ship overhead.
“Dmitry, tell those Akula pilots we have close air incoming. They’ll sweep that area over there. Let’s not have any incidents.”
