by Marko Kloos
Major Renner doesn’t look happy, but she shakes her head curtly.
“I want to hear if anyone dissents,” the colonel says. “I am serious, people. You’ve all put your head into the noose with me when you decided to spring me out of the detention berth. You’ve earned the right to a choice here.”
There’s silence in the room except for the faint rustling of uniforms as people shift in their seats a bit. Then Major Renner clears her throat.
“We don’t go back and complete our mission, none of this is going to be worth the court-martial, sir,” she says. “They won’t risk the task force on a blind transition into the solar system, especially if we go missing.”
All over the room, there’s murmured agreement.
Colonel Campbell nods. Then he exhales slowly and pinches the bridge of his nose with thumb and forefinger. “Very well. Then let’s figure out how to get back to Fomalhaut, and then get the hell out of here.”
“Two options,” the XO says back in CIC. “And you won’t like either one.”
She highlights two different trajectories on the hologram in front of her. The display table shows a long-scale three-dimensional map of the inner solar system, or at least the slice of it that stretches from Earth to the asteroid belt beyond Mars.
“Option one,” she says, and the first trajectory lights up briefly in pale yellow. “We go back the way we came, through the blockade and around Mars. We’d do another slingshot burn and hope we get lucky again. If we make it past, we’ll stealth to the Alliance transition point again, wait for a gap in the Lanky patrol pattern, and slip through into Fomalhaut. Same run we took in, only in reverse. Ten days, little less if we manage to use Earth’s gravity well for a nice push.”
She highlights the second trajectory, which lights up in pale green.
“Option two, we go the long way. With the current alignment, we can take the deep-space route here, but there won’t be anything to slingshot around. It would take a lot more time and energy.”
“How much longer?” the colonel asks.
“If we want to have any juice left in the tanks after we get to Fomalhaut, we can’t go full-out burn on that leg. Thirty-five days at one-g sustained for both legs of the burn, and I wouldn’t advise going any faster, or we’ll be coasting through the transition point with vacuum in the tanks.”
Colonel Campbell studies the map while rubbing his chin. There’s gray stubble on his face that makes him look uncharacteristically untidy.
“I like fast,” he says. “Thirty-five days is more time than we can spare. But the fleet back at Fomalhaut can’t make the run past Mars.”
He reaches into the display and zooms in on the area around the Alliance’s Alcubierre node. The two alternate trajectories converge or separate here, depending on your perspective and starting point, and he flips the map around a bit as he follows both tracks with his finger.
“We go the deep-space route, we may find a different way back from the node to Earth. Could be they don’t patrol that stretch of space as heavily.”
“Or at all,” Major Renner says.
“God knows there’s precisely fuck-all between here and the node on that route. If we get stuck out there, we’re truly stuck. Not even a comms relay in that area, never mind a depot or a mining outpost. But thirty-five days.”
I watch the exchange with some anxiety. I don’t know which fills me with more dread: the prospect of doing the death ride around Mars again in reverse and rolling the dice on those fifty-fifty odds one more time, or spending over a month in this ship scouting out the middle of nowhere.
Then Dmitry, who has been standing next to me and politely observing the exchange, clears his throat, and everyone in the CIC pit turns to look at him.
“Is not fuck-awl between here and node,” he says.
“Excuse me, Sergeant?” Colonel Campbell says with a raised eyebrow.
Dmitry steps up to the holotable and pokes the pale green option-two route with his finger. “You go this way. Is not just empty space. We call this Krasnyy Marshrut Odin. Red Route One. Like in old capitalist military film. There is anchorage for refuel and supply.” He taps a point halfway on the trajectory. “We use this sometimes when we have new ship to keep secret. Or for specialist operation. Black ops,” he adds, in his best version of an American accent.
“Whoa,” Major Renner says. All around, there is some incredulous chuckling and tittering in the CIC. “You are telling us that the SRA has a secret supply point for refueling Special Forces units. That sits near the trajectory we have to take to get to the SRA transition point.”
“Da,” Dmitry says agreeably.
“And you are volunteering this information. As if it isn’t a major military secret.”
“Da,” Dmitry says again.
“Why would you do that?” Colonel Campbell asks.
“Is best way to get back. Not quick like go around Mars again, but more safe. You go faster burn, use more fuel, fill up again at Alliance anchorage. Can get food, too, but I would not recommend.”
“You have the coordinates for this anchorage,” the XO says.
“Is in suit, in computer.”
“And they’ll let us refuel there? Think you can convince them to refuel a Commonwealth ship? That’s mighty risky.”
“Nobody there,” Dmitry says. “Is automated.”
“They’ll throw you into military prison and throw away the access card when they learn that you gave away a major military secret, Sergeant Chistyakov,” the colonel says.
“Then you will not tell,” Dmitry says with a wry little smile.
“Assume we can get there at full burn, fuel consumption be damned. How much time would we need if we can top off the tanks at the Alliance anchorage?” Colonel Campbell asks the XO.
Major Renner consults her PDP and taps around on the screen for a few moments. “Seventeen days, sir.”
“To the anchorage or the turnaround point?”
“To the transition point, sir. The whole run.”
Colonel Campbell looks at the major, then me, then Dmitry, and then he shakes his head with a smile.
“What weird and wonderful times we’re living in, people.”
“Khorosho?” Dmitry asks. “Is good?”
“Ochyen khorosho,” the colonel replies. “Very good. XO, lay in the trajectory for option two and prep the ship for departure. We’re going the long way in a hurry. And let’s hope there’s light traffic along the way.”
CHAPTER 16
I don’t want to be awake when we pass Earth again for our ride back to Fomalhaut. I don’t want to see my home planet and Luna through the optical feed, close enough to make out continents on Earth and man-made structures on the moon, because I don’t want to be tempted to just jump into one of the escape pods and shoot myself Earthward. Luckily, I am so fatigued that knocking myself out completely takes no effort at all.
Back in my berth, I take twice the instructed dosage of the pain meds that Corpsman Randall gave me. Then I lie down on my rack, close my eyes, and wait for the warm and fuzzy sensation of the narcotics to flood my brain.
When I wake up again, my body seems to have lost all desire for independent locomotion. With the privacy curtain drawn, I’m in a little box that feels comforting and predictable. It lets me pretend that there isn’t a larger world beyond that curtain, tedious days spent standing the watch on a ship hurtling through the hostile vacuum of space, always just one major hull breach away from oblivion, in a galaxy full of genocidal aliens and a human race that isn’t much better in the ethics department.
I check my chronometer to find that I’ve slept for thirteen hours. I should be rested, and the overwhelming fatigue is no longer weighing on my brain, but instead of refreshed I just feel drained.
I get up and put on a fresh set of CDU fatigues. The ones I am wearing right now are from the supply chain of the carrier Regulus, as is my armor set hanging in its spot in the wall locker nearby. I’ve attached a name tape an
d rank insignia, but no unit patches. I’m not sure where I belong at this point. The fleet? The New Svalbard militia? The rebellious HD battalions? The crew of Indy? It doesn’t feel proper to declare membership in one of those groups above any of the others, so I claim no affiliation at all on my uniform right now.
I don’t want to go back to CIC and stare at a holographic globe for hours on end that shows me to the tenth of a kilometer just how far I am away from Halley and Earth again, and how fast I’m going the other way. Instead, I fasten the locks on my boots and wash up one-handed in the bathroom nook of my berth. Then I step out of the hatch and turn left, toward the NCO mess.
I am intimately familiar with Indy’s limited menu selections. There are two kinds of sandwiches: the standard service bologna, which is only half soy and actually has some meat content, and peanut butter and jelly, which doesn’t. Even considering all the gross combinations and throwing in a slice of soy cheese, there are only seven or eight ways to recombine the selection. Then there are standard field-ration packages, reheated in the galley. Those come in six different entree options, all of which are just half a degree more edible than the standard Basic Nutritional Allowance rations I used to choke down in the PRC back home. We haven’t had anything other than the prepackaged-ration stuff for weeks now, and it’s amazing how much the lack of food variety can drag down the general morale of grunts and sailors. The pain meds suppress whatever appetite I may have had left, but I can feel my stomach rumbling, so I grab a meal tray despite my lack of gusto and put a bologna sandwich and a cup of coffee on it.
I’m halfway through the coffee and two bites into the mealy sandwich when Dmitry walks into the NCO mess. He sees me sitting by myself in a corner of the room and crosses the mess hall. There’s a bottle in his hand, and he puts it down on the table in front of me as he sits down.
“Present,” he says. “From distillery on Kiev.”
“What is it?” I ask. The stuff in the bottle looks clear and innocent, like tap water.
“Is distilled fermentation,” he says.
“Fermented what, exactly?”
“Is best not to ask,” Dmitry replies. He pops the plastic seal of the bottle open with his thumb and pours a bit of it into my coffee before I can yank the mug away.
“You try. Is not so bad.”
“Your assault carrier actually has a distillery.”
“Is Russian ship. You will not find Russian ship anywhere in SRA fleet without engineer who knows how to make proper drink in secret.”
“And here I thought all my preconceptions about Russians were wrong,” I say. “You get twenty pounds of personal gear to bring with you, and you take along alcohol?”
Dmitry shrugs. “Is useful sometimes, no? Better than box of medals or playthings.”
I bring the mug up to my nose and take a smell. The familiar, slightly sour scent of the standard fleet soybean coffee substitute now has a slightly acrid quality to it. I take a sip, expecting to gag on the spiked blend, but it actually has a tolerable flavor, and I enjoy the slight burn on my palate.
“Not bad,” I say, and take another sip. Dmitry smiles and pushes the bottle all the way to my side of the table.
“You take. Keep for useful purposes.”
“This is serious trade currency, Dmitry. You can probably trade that to the galley cooks for a week of field-ration picks.”
“I pay you for what I owe,” he says. Then he nods at my bandaged hand. “You trade hand of yours for enemy battlespace coordinator.”
I open my mouth to tell Dmitry that that isn’t quite the case, but he waves me off impatiently.
“Yes, yes. I have codes for transition point. Was not personal favor. You save yourself and ship so we can go back to Fomalhaut.” He pronounces the system’s name with a -ch sound in the middle. “But is no matter why. You still lose fingers, and I still put air in lungs. Maybe—if things do not go all shit again—I go home one day. Because you hold hand in front of gun and make shots go down and not here.” He taps at his forehead and chest.
“You got anyone at home? Family?”
He blinks, as if my question has thrown him off a little. Then he reaches into the pocket of his lizard-pattern fatigues and fishes out a little personal document pouch. The SRA version looks much like the ones we carry around, just a tiny waterproof sleeve big enough for a handful of ID chips and maybe a letter hard copy or two. Dmitry reaches into his pouch and takes out a print image. He puts it in front of me almost gingerly.
“Maksim,” he says. “Husband. Big, dumb, but good heart.”
The image shows a soldier about my age. He has an aggressive buzz cut, and he’s dressed in the same lizard-pattern SRA battle dress tunic Dmitry is wearing. The undershirt is striped horizontally in alternating white and blue, and the beret under his shoulder board is sky blue.
“He’s a marine, too?” I ask.
“Like I say. Big and dumb.”
I grin and hand his picture back to him. Dmitry takes it and slips it back into his document pouch carefully.
That kind of personal disclosure requires a tit for tat. I take my own personal pouch out of my leg pocket and open it. It has my military ID in it, the last letter I got from Mom, and two pictures of Halley. I take out the one of her in her flight suit, the one I’ve been carrying around since she sent it to me back before I even joined what was still the navy back then.
Looking at her smile and that rugged short haircut of hers gives me a momentary ache that’s far worse than what I’m feeling from my healing nose or the bandaged hand. I give the picture to Dmitry, who raises an eyebrow and nods in appreciation.
“She is pilot,” he says. “Good pilot?”
“Good pilot,” I confirm. “Instructor at Combat Flight School.”
“What is she pilot of? Big piece of govno with big gun for shooting Russian marines? What do you call, Shrike?”
“Not a Shrike. Wasp and Dragonfly drop ships. Small piece of govno with smaller guns for shooting Russian marines.”
Dmitry chuckles, his eyes still on the picture of Halley. “Show me other one.”
I hand over the second picture, which is one of Halley and me at a fleet rec facility two years ago. We’re both wearing dress blues, and Halley’s fruit salad of medal ribbons is slightly but noticeably bigger than mine.
“Girlfriend? Wife?”
“Fiancée,” I say.
“What is fiancée?”
“We’re getting married,” I reply. “Once I get back. If we get back.”
Dmitry reaches into a different pocket and produces a small metal object, which he holds up and turns slowly with his fingertips. It’s a stylized eagle holding a wreath in its talons. The wreath has the Roman numeral III in its center. The eagle’s wings are stretched out behind it, a raptor in the middle of a high-speed dive for its prey.
“Another present,” he says. “I have these for fifteen years. Now I give to you.”
He hands the eagle badge to me. I put it on my palm and look at it.
“Are these jump wings?”
“I get at spaceborne training course. Is for dress uniform, to look pretty. Not for battle dress. You keep, maybe give to fiancée. You can tell her you took off body of dead Russian.”
“I can’t take your damn jump wings, Dmitry.” I put the eagle badge on the table and carefully slide it over to him. If the Sino-Russian marines put half as much value on their original set of jump wings from their version of a School of Spaceborne Infantry as our own SI troopers do, he just gave me the most sentimental thing he owns aside from the picture of Maksim.
“You take, or I punch color from your hair again, Andrew,” he says without smiling, and his expression makes it pretty clear that he won’t brook an argument. “Is poor trade for left hand, I know. But you take anyway.”
He pushes the eagle back across the table. It certainly looks like it has been worn for fifteen years. The gold enamel on the wreath in the eagle’s talons is rubbed off in spots, an
d all the high points of the relief stamping are worn smooth. I wonder if that little set of jump wings has been on a contested planet with its owner while I traded shots with him at some point.
“Fine,” I say. “Now shut up about the whole thing. Like you said, I was just making sure our ticket back didn’t get yanked.”
I open Dmitry’s bottle again and put another splash into my coffee. Then I hand the bottle to Dmitry, who accepts it without hesitation before taking a long swig. Then he caps the bottle and puts it back on the table.
“We are same, you and I. Both duraky. Fools. Idiots. They tell us, ‘Go here, shoot this man, call missile on this building,’ and we do. Shoot at each other for many years, kill each other’s comrades, and get little pieces of metal with colorful ribbon. We should not be here. We should be home, you and I. Back home with Maksim and . . . what is name of your fiancée?” He pronounces the new word deliberately.
“Halley,” I say. “Her first name is Diana, but she hates it, so she’s just Halley to everyone.”
“Halley,” Dmitry repeats. With his Russian accent, it sounds like “Challey.”
It almost seems like a cliché from an old war movie, I think. Enemies get together, have a drink, exchange trinkets, and show off pictures of each other’s sweethearts, and then they realize that they have so much in common that they don’t want to fight each other anymore. The futility of war, young men and women ordered from above to kill each other for stupid reasons, and all that. But I don’t feel ennobled or enlightened by any of this. Mostly, I just feel like I’ve wasted most of the last five years of my life killing people who didn’t need or want to be killed, as part of a big stupid machine that has been chewing up the very assets we needed to fight the Lankies, the real threat. A little numbered cog in the meat grinder, ready to turn on command. And now the same people who pulled the handle on that grinder over and over are probably getting ready to walk away from the mess, hands clean, to leave the rest of us to our fates.
