by Marko Kloos
“Not as hardy as the Lankies,” I say.
“They’re just bigger and stronger. But you don’t see them trying to colonize places like this. They go for the real estate we’ve already prepared for them.”
“That’s true,” I admit. “Maybe that makes them smarter, too.”
“I can’t argue much with that point of view right now,” Sergeant Fallon says. She leans back in her chair with a little sigh and stretches out her prosthetic leg underneath the table. “Five years with that thing a part of me, and it still feels like a foreign object at the end of a long day.”
Allie returns with our drinks, squat polyplast tumblers full of a light blue liquid. She puts the glasses in front of us with a curt smile and walks off again.
I pick up my glass and smell the contents. “God. It smells like someone dropped sweetener into a pint of aviation fuel.”
“Tastes a bit like that, too.” Sergeant Fallon smiles. “Watch this.”
She takes a lighter out of the arm pocket of her fatigues, turns it on, and holds the little hissing gas flame to the surface of her drink. Blue flames crackle into life. She watches the alcohol fire for a moment and then extinguishes it by putting her hand on top of the tumbler to cut off the oxygen. Then she picks up the glass and takes a long sip.
“You just want to let it heat up the top layer, but not burn long enough to use up too much alcohol,” she says. “It’s a delicate balance.”
She hands me the lighter, and I do like she did. The drink doesn’t taste quite as potent as it smells, but I can feel the burn of the alcohol all the way down into my stomach. It tastes of mint and licorice and a few other things I can’t identify. All in all, there’s a surprising variety of flavor, considering this stuff was probably distilled in a back room down here and aged for days instead of years.
“Not bad,” I say.
“Damn straight it ain’t. Just don’t have more than one, or you won’t be able to remember how to latch your battle armor for the next day or two.”
She looks past me and raises an eyebrow. I hear steps behind me and turn to see the three SI troopers walking over to us from the other side of the room. By their tense postures and grim facial expressions, I doubt they’re coming our way to make a social call. I turn my chair around so I can face the three troopers as they stop in front of our table.
“I think you’d do us all a favor if you and your boys just stayed over there, Master Sergeant,” Sergeant Fallon says. “We have no need for company.”
“You’re the Earthside hero who ran the show for that little mutiny,” the SI master sergeant says. His companions are both staff sergeants. All of them have master drop badges and various other infantry credentials on their smocks.
“You have it all wrong, Master Sergeant. What we did wasn’t a mutiny. What you guys did was attempted robbery.”
The SI sergeant balls his fists and flexes his jaw. “That drop on the admin center, we lost four guys from my unit, you rubble-humping riot cop. One of them was a first sergeant I’ve dropped with for ten years. You owe me way more than just some asshole commentary. Legal or not, that wasn’t for you to decide. But you never should have ordered your people to fire on their own troops.”
“They didn’t fire on their own troops,” Sergeant Fallon replies. “They fired on some jacked-up space monkeys taking illegal orders from a warmed-up one-star reservist. And don’t you fucking start talking about who owes whom ’less you want a list of my casualties to answer for.”
“Homeworld Defense,” the SI master sergeant replies, pronouncing the words like he’s describing an unappetizing medical condition. “Those weren’t casualties, Sarge. Those were property damage.”
I don’t see her telegraphing the move at all, but Sergeant Fallon’s artificial leg shoots out from underneath the table and takes the SI sergeant down at the ankles. He falls sideways with a yelp, and I push my chair backward and scramble to my feet quickly. The SI master sergeant’s head hits the edge of the plastic table and takes it down with him, along with our drinks. The other two SI troopers launch themselves at us, and the brawl is on.
My opponent is half a head shorter than I am but looks much more fit than I feel right now. I take advantage of my slightly longer reach and jab him in the face with a quickly thrown left straight, which rocks his head back a little but doesn’t slow him down. He hauls off with his right hand and hits my own right fist, which I’d put in front of my face to block his punch, and I end up punching myself in the lip with my own hand. Then we’re too close for punches. He grabs me by the tunic and tries to head-butt me. I turn my head slightly and pull my chin to my chest to make his blow land somewhere other than my face. Then I pull back my right leg and knee my opponent as hard as I can. I was aiming for his groin, but due to our height difference, I hit his abdomen instead. He doubles over without letting go of my uniform. I knee him again in the same spot, and he lets go and stumbles back.
Next to me, the third SI trooper is already on the ground, holding his nose. The master sergeant who led the attack is just now getting back to his feet, and I look on as Sergeant Fallon very deliberately cocks her leg and kicks the SI master sergeant in the small of the back. He shouts out in pain and falls backward.
There’s a loud and sharp whistle from the door. We all turn to see Chief Constable Guest, the moon’s top law-enforcement officer, standing in the doorway and holding the door open with one hand. The barrel-chested constable looks only very slightly less solid than the heavy steel door or the foot-thick concrete wall next to him. His other hand is hovering somewhere in the vicinity of his gun holster and the stun stick on his belt, and his sour expression makes it clear that he is currently thinking about deploying one or the other. He assesses the situation for a few seconds and then points at the SI troopers.
“You three. Out. And don’t come back in here. No argument, no debate. Leave now, or I will lock you up in my ice dungeon.”
The SI master sergeant looks like he wants to put up an argument anyway, but Constable Guest just shakes his head and removes the stun stick from his belt. Then he points over his shoulder with the crowd-control device, through the door he’s holding open with the other hand.
“Now.”
The master sergeant turns around and looks at Sergeant Fallon, who returns his gaze impassively.
“We are not done yet,” he says to her. Then he picks his beret up off the floor and heads toward the door. His comrades follow him, but not before shooting us hostile glances of their own. When they reach the door, Constable Guest steps aside for them, still holding open the hatch, and they file out one by one. Then he lets go of the door, puts the stun stick back onto his belt, and walks over to where Sergeant Fallon and I are standing. All around us, people haven’t even interrupted their conversations. The colonists on New Svalbard are some of the toughest people I’ve ever met, and our little interservice disagreement hasn’t even raised any eyebrows down here.
“You two of all people shouldn’t be down here picking fights with other soldiers,” he says to us in his laid-back Texas drawl, his tone stern and sorrowful, as if he’s lecturing his daughters instead of two hardened combat veterans. “When people get into it down here, I have to come and straighten things out, and then my expensive and hard-to-get hand-pressed coffee gets cold in my office. I don’t like it when that happens. It disturbs my peace. Please do not disturb my peace.”
“Sorry about that,” Sergeant Fallon says. “I would have avoided the whole thing, but those three had a tussle on their minds the minute they decided to walk over to our table. Hard feelings.”
“Well, maybe I need to ban Camp Frostbite personnel from town altogether again. Not that I have the manpower to enforce that right now. Or maybe I need to just ban all of you from all the bars in town.” He looks around and sighs. “But then you’ll have no place to go, and you’ll just beat each other up out on the Ellipse somewhere.”
“Won’t happen again,” Sergeant Fallon say
s. She bends down to pick up the table the SI master sergeant tipped over when he crashed into it. I pick up the plastic tumblers and put them back onto the table when she has righted it.
“See to it that it doesn’t,” Constable Guest says. “Please. It would go a long way toward restoring my good mood.”
Constable Guest is jovial, soft-spoken, and courteous. He’s also about the size of a drop-ship tail ramp, and probably roughly as heavy. I’ve not seen him in a fight since I arrived on New Svalbard for the first time a few weeks ago, but I have little doubt that he could mop the floor with half a squad of infantry grunts if provoked.
“I’ll give you a free pass on this one, because they came to hassle you and not the other way around,” he says. “But do not make this a habit, or you will get on my bad side. And as much as I respect your valor in the service of our Commonwealth, you do not want to find yourself on my bad side. I know you Earth folks aren’t used to being locked up inside for months to ride out the winter, but I cannot have hand-to-hand combat happening in my area of responsibility.”
Sergeant Fallon looks slightly embarrassed by Constable Guest’s dressing-down, and it’s the first time I’ve ever seen that particular emotion on her face.
“That was my failure,” she says. “No excuse. I think I need to hop on one of those snow tractors and drive around in the fresh air for a day or two. This indoor living is starting to cloud my judgment.”
I have the taste of blood in my mouth, and my left lower lip is feeling a little puffy. It will probably be fat for the rest of the day. The girl Allie walks over from the bar with her dirty hand towel and starts mopping up the drinks we spilled when the fight started. I step aside to make room for her.
“We have a spell of decent weather coming up in a few hours,” Constable Guest says. “Winds down to below fifty, light snow. Good enough for outside pursuits. You may want to consider stretching your legs a bit. Maybe go up to the carrier. We’ll be able to run flight ops again for a little while, from what I hear. Take it easy, you two, and don’t cause me any more grief than you have to, please.”
Constable Guest nods at Allie and turns to walk out of the bar. He has to duck slightly to fit through the door as he leaves.
“Go into orbit to lock myself in an even smaller space,” Sergeant Fallon says. “No, thank you. I’m pretty fucking glad I pulled a TA ticket after boot, let me tell you. I don’t know how you fleet people can stand it.”
We look around, and nobody else in the bar is paying even the slightest bit of attention to us. We could sit back down and order another round of drinks, but I’m still unpleasantly buzzing from the adrenaline jolt, and the laid-back mood from earlier is broken thoroughly.
“Are we still running the show in the ops center?” I ask Sergeant Fallon, and she nods curtly.
“Padded the crew a little. Half civvies, half our HD people. We’re not letting any of the Camp Frostbite troops anywhere near the place, and the new troops are just going in and out of Frostbite.”
“I’m going to see what’s up in orbit, talk to Indy for a bit. I’ve been out of the loop for two weeks.”
“Hitting the ground running,” Sergeant Fallon says, and shakes her head. “No wonder you made E-6 so fast. You need to learn how to ride out downtime.”
“I’ve had almost two weeks of downtime,” I reply. “Twelve days of utter fucking boredom with a six-hour battle in the middle. If they gave out medals for sitting on your ass on a carrier, I’d have ribbons from my collarbone all the way down to my knee.”
“The constable would make a killer grunt,” I say to Sergeant Fallon as we walk on the Ellipse back toward the ops center. “If we even had battle armor for someone his size.”
“No, he wouldn’t,” she replies. “He’s too laid-back and too smart besides.”
“Don’t think he has it in him to take someone out?”
“Oh, I know he does,” she says. “Don’t let the guy fool you with that antique pop gun on his belt. I’ve been in his office a few times. He has a ready pack sitting in the corner. Hardshell laminate armor, all magazine pouches loaded up, and an M-66C in a locked bracket right next to that. It’s all dolled up with zero-mag battle optics. And the finish on it is so grungy, I guarantee you it sees plenty of use at the range. Our constable is a bona fide gunfighter.”
“Can you imagine him in an infantry squad? He could damn near carry an M-80 in each hand. Biggest hands I’ve ever . . .”
I trail off as Sergeant Fallon looks over her shoulder. We’re not alone on this section of the Ellipse, but the foot traffic is light right now, and I notice the sounds of military boots on concrete behind us just a fraction of a moment later. We turn and see the three SI troopers from the bar coming up quickly behind us, and none of them look like they’re in the mood for an amicable chat. They come to a stop maybe five meters away.
“Care to continue our discussion from earlier, Sergeant?” the SI master sergeant says.
“That’s Master Sergeant to you,” Sergeant Fallon answers coolly. “And you guys better take your candy asses back to Camp Frostbite before someone gets hurt.”
“Maybe someone ought to get hurt,” one of the staff sergeants says. He reaches under his fatigue tunic and pulls out a knife with a short double-edged blade that has the glossy shine of ceramic to it. “Don’t think you get to pull that shit with the roboleg more than once.”
I don’t see Sergeant Fallon even start to make a move, but in the blink of an eye, there’s a pistol in her hands. She holds it at low ready, not aimed at anyone in particular, but I have no doubt that she could cap all three of the SI troopers before they can cover the distance between us. The standard-issue M109 automatic pistol is woefully inadequate for defense against troops in full battle armor, but none of us down here are wearing hardshell right now, and the 4.5-millimeter high-velocity projectiles from a service pistol can do awful things to an unprotected human body at close range.
The three SI troopers freeze on the spot. I get that unwelcome wrenching feeling in the middle of my chest that always wells up when lethal violence is about to happen. I look at Sergeant Fallon’s face, and she looks like she is merely deciding where to put the first bullet.
“Whoa,” the SI master sergeant says. “Whoa. Take it easy.” He holds out his hands slowly. Sergeant Fallon tracks his movement with the muzzle of her pistol, and it never wavers even a fraction of a millimeter.
“Drop the fucking blade,” she says to the SI trooper who is still holding his ceramic knife. “I’m not going to tell you twice.”
The trooper complies and lets go of his knife. It clatters to the concrete. The SI master sergeant looks back at his man, sees the knife at his feet, and shakes his head slowly in frowning disapproval.
“Back there in the bar, that was harmless fun,” Sergeant Fallon says. “This right here is not. I could have shot that idiot the second he pulled his knife. You all want to die in this place, right now?”
“No, ma’am,” the now disarmed staff sergeant says. Some colonists pass by, giving us a berth when they see the gun in Sergeant Fallon’s hand, but are seemingly unconcerned otherwise.
“Take your men and go back to Frostbite now,” Sergeant Fallon tells her SI counterpart. “Do not come back into town while HD is running the show here, or I will shoot you on sight. We clear?”
“Yes, Master Sergeant,” the SI master sergeant says. He takes a slow step back, hands still outstretched. Then he turns on his heel and pulls the other two SI troopers with him. Sergeant Fallon keeps the muzzle of her pistol trained on them until they disappear around a bend fifty meters down the concourse. Then she exhales sharply, as if she had been holding her breath the whole time. She lowers the pistol and tucks it back into a holster on her belt. Then she straightens out the tunic to cover the butt of the gun again and picks up the dropped knife. For a long moment, neither of us says anything as we both process what just happened.
“We’re not a military anymore,” she finally
says to me. “Senior NCOs assaulting, pulling weapons on each other. We’re just a bunch of armed gangs now.”
She nods at me to follow her and starts walking toward the ops center again, a bit more briskly than before. I look over my shoulder to where the SI troopers disappeared around the bend, and follow Sergeant Fallon.
“We need to get off this fucking rock,” she says. “If we don’t find a sense of purpose again pretty damn soon, we’re going to be shooting it out in the streets with each other before too long.”
CHAPTER 3
I’m still buzzing with adrenaline when Sergeant Fallon and I walk into the ops center a few minutes later. The confrontation down in the Ellipse has turned my mood a bit sour, so I throw myself back into work to get my mind off the event. I sit down in front of the comms console and check our situation overhead while I contact the Indianapolis for a status update. The holographic display comes to life and dutifully displays ship icons and hull numbers.
Up in orbit, the strangest collection of warships I have ever seen is circling frozen little New Svalbard. The fleet overhead is nominally split up into three factions at the moment. There’s the NAC contingent: the carrier Regulus and the battlecruiser Avenger. Then there’s the SRA contingent that came with them: the assault carrier Minsk, the destroyer Shen Yang, the frigates Gomati and Neustrashimyy, and three unarmed supply vessels that are worth their weight in platinum right now. Finally, there’s the sole remaining member of the nascent New Svalbard Territorial Army’s space arm, Colonel Campbell’s little orbital combat ship Indianapolis. On paper, we have force parity between the SRA and NAC units, but the Minsk and her escorts are all thirty years old at least, and I would bet heavily on the Regulus and her bodyguard cruiser in a tussle. Luckily, we’re all one big multinational refugee family now.
