by Marko Kloos
“They didn’t just take all the best of the Fleet gear,” Major Masoud continues. “They have stuff that never even made it into the Corps. They had their own R&D department. Most of their gear is made to fight Lankies. Those battleships we found unfinished were just part of it.”
“Anti-Lanky gear,” I repeat. “A whole task force full of it. Would come in handy for the Mars counterstrike.”
“Very,” Major Masoud says. “I see you are thinking like most of the SOCOM guys at that meeting.”
“So why aren’t we doing that? Go after the Exodus fleet, reclaim the gear, then use all that to take back Mars?”
“Time,” he says. “That op would take time and possibly cost us a large pile of casualties that we can ill afford at the moment. Those traitors took a lot of combat power with them. A dozen warships, all top of the line. And God knows what they stashed in their hideout system before the Lankies forced their early departure. For all we know, they have half a dozen of those new battleships waiting on the other side of the chute when we go after them in force.”
“Well, we won’t know for sure until we go have a look.”
The major gets out of his chair and walks over to the door. Then he pokes his head out into the hallway as if he wants to make sure nobody is eavesdropping out there. Satisfied, he walks over to my documentation shelf and studies the terribly uninteresting spines of the training manuals.
“Like I said—there were two camps of opinion at the joint chiefs meeting. One group favored the ‘Mars First’ approach. The other group voted to go after the Exodus traitors first and then use the reclaimed assets and personnel to increase the success chance of the Mars assault. We will only get one shot at retaking Mars. Once we are committed, all the chips will be in play. Do or die. Most of SOCOM are in the second camp, but we were outvoted, so Mars First it is.”
“However,” I say.
Major Masoud flashes a grin that is entirely devoid of humor or good cheer. I know he wouldn’t be here if that was all there was to the joint chiefs meeting.
“However,” he repeats. “SOCOM got concessions. I am putting together a special operations mission to scout the Exodus system and assess enemy disposition prior to the Mars assault. And I want you on board with us.”
It takes me a few moments to process this information. I know I’m a fairly competent specialist in my field, but I also know that I’m nowhere near the top of the field in the podhead community, whether by ability or rank. I’m certainly not high enough in the hierarchy to have a senior SEAL and Medal of Honor recipient personally request my membership on a mission.
“Sir, why would you need a combat controller on a deep-space recon mission?” I ask.
“I don’t need you in your primary MOS,” Major Masoud says. “I am taking a company of podheads along, and I want you to lead one of the platoons.”
I make a mental note to myself to check the sandwich I just ate for contamination. Right now, nothing other than foodborne illness would explain the slide into surreal territory the day has taken since I started eating my lunch.
“Sir, I’m just an E-7, and just barely one at that. I don’t have the rank or the skills to lead a scout platoon.”
“You are among the most experienced people left on that list.” He taps the breast pocket of his tunic. “I went through your mission stats, and you’ve done 212 combat drops since you graduated from combat controller school, almost half of them pod drops. I need people who have experience doing recon patrols with small teams, and that’s pretty much all you’ve done for the last four years. And you did well at Fomalhaut. I know about New Svalbard and the rescue mission on the SRA moon. Trust me, Sergeant, you have the skills and the attitude I want.”
“Sergeants first class are platoon sergeants at best, not platoon leaders, sir. That’s an officer slot. Especially in SOCOM.”
Major Masoud makes a dismissive gesture with his hand.
“We are short on officers. Hell, we are short on everything. They’re putting freshly minted second lieutenants in charge of SI platoons right out of OCS without blinking. Making an experienced NCO a limited duty officer is not a problem right now. I can have you on the priority roster for a promotion to second lieutenant on Monday. One week of LDO Academy over at Newport, and you’re done.”
I sit, stunned by the broadside I just received, and find myself wanting to check my chrono to see how close I am to being able to get a drink over at the NCO club.
“No offense, sir,” I say. “But I’ve never thought of myself as officer material.”
Major Masoud smiles curtly and checks the chrono on his wrist. Then he pulls out the camouflage beret he’s wearing tucked under his left shoulder board and slaps it against his thigh to unroll it.
“I have a few more personal calls to make today, Sergeant. And I’m not ordering you, I’m asking. But think on it quickly, because I have a mission to put together and slots to fill. Here’s my direct node.”
He pulls a clear plastic card out of his pocket and puts it onto the desk in front of me.
“The offer is good for forty-eight hours, Sergeant Grayson. Think it over, discuss it with your wife, but give me an up-or-down vote within two days.”
I stand up as Major Masoud turns toward the door. When he is in the doorframe, he turns around and looks back at me, standing in my office, with the overflowing shelves of reference manuals all around me.
“You can choose to stay here and babysit some half-green drill sergeants for another boot camp cycle. And then you’ll find yourself in a drop ship in a little over three months, with a platoon of these kids in the bus with you. Dropping onto Mars. Taking on thousands of Lankies and hoping that we have enough Orions in orbit and rifles on the ground.”
He puts the beret on his head and tugs it into place over his right eyebrow with a sharp and precise movement.
“Or you can be on the tip of the spear again. Pulling off the hairiest recon mission you’ve ever done, alongside the best podheads left in the Fleet. Going after those traitor sacks of shit and laying the groundwork for the ass-kicking that’s coming their way. You can help us tip the scales in a major way, Sergeant. Make a damn difference.”
He nods at the plastic network ID card on the desk in front of me.
“Forty-eight hours.”
I don’t bother with a salute. Instead, I nod, and Major Masoud returns the nod with a stern face. Then he walks off and leaves me standing behind my desk, with the regs manuals piled up on the shelves beside me and the garrison flab I’ve acquired straining the front of my tunic a little. I listen to the sound of the major’s boots as he walks down the hallway toward the CQ office and the building entrance.
Tip of the spear again, I repeat to myself. Only this time that spear is getting poked down a dark bear den, and the bear inside is the size of a horse.
I pick up the network ID card the major left behind and aim for the trash basket next to my desk. Then I pause and think for a few moments. I sigh and stick the card into the side pocket of my CDU trousers with a muttered curse.
CHAPTER 10
“No fucking way,” Halley says when I break the news to her. She tosses her fork onto the table, picks up the napkin on her lap, and wipes her mouth carefully. Then she laughs out loud.
“Quick, turn on the Network news,” she says. “I want to see those Lankies.”
“Which Lankies?” I ask. We are in the little kitchen of our joint quarters on Luna, and there’s a plate of bring-back chow-hall food in front of me that I haven’t touched yet.
“The Lankies you said were going to tap-dance down Broadway before you accept an officer commission.”
“I haven’t said yes yet,” I protest. “I wanted to talk to you about it first.”
Halley looks at me and shakes her head, the way you do at an unreasonable child.
“Andrew, I know you too well. We’ve been together long enough. If you’re telling me about it, you’ve pretty much made up your mind already.
If you weren’t interested at all, you would have told him so right then and there, and you’d mention it as a footnote maybe over drinks at the RecFac.”
I pick up my fork and start poking around on my plate without much enthusiasm. The quality of the once-vaunted military chow has declined over the last year to where PRC rations used to be. The current PRC food rations are just a half step above inedible. The people in the PRCs have always supplemented their protein intake with what we used to call “dadot” meat—“don’t-ask-don’t-tell”—but now I hear they’re at a point where sewer rat kabobs are fetching substantial black-market premiums over the shit the ration factories crank out. Too many mouths to feed, not enough left to feed them all properly. Sometimes I still think we kept the Lankies from doing us a giant favor.
“Three months until the offensive, huh?” Halley asks. “How solid do you think that number is?”
“Well, he sat in with the joint chiefs when they nailed it down. I’d say it doesn’t get any more solid than that.”
“Fuck.” Halley picks up her fork again and starts oscillating it between index and middle finger. “That’s too damn soon. We have maybe half the pilots we need, and that’s with shortening the training as much as possible.”
“What do you think of the strategy?” I ask.
“Taking Mars first? Yeah, I really think we have no other choice. Not if there are still people holding out underground. And God only knows what those ugly motherfuckers are going to throw at us once they are settled in all the way. That incursion two weeks ago still gives me the willies.”
“Why? They didn’t get through. Fleet blew ’em to shit.”
“The change in tactics,” Halley says. “They came in way faster than usual. Few kilometers more per second, they could have sailed right through our defensive screen. All it takes is one Orion miss, and we have that mess like last year again, only a hundred times worse. We would never get a lid on a thousand Lankies right in the middle of a metroplex. Not without nuking our own cities.”
“And then what’s left to save,” I say.
“We can’t let them keep a staging base in our Solar System,” Halley says. “We kick them off Mars, or we are done within a year or two. I just wish we had a lot more time to prepare. Much as I don’t want to be stuck at Drop Ship U for another twelve or twenty-four months.”
In our living room nook, there’s a large screen on the wall that’s supposed to make up for the lack of windows and viewports on the lunar base. It shows the feed from the nearest environmental camera on top of this building’s dome. Right now, the blue-and-gray orb of our home world is rising above the low mountains on the lunar horizon. So many nicer, bigger, cleaner planets in the galaxy, I think. Why can’t they just leave us this one? It’s not much of a prize as it is, anyway. But maybe it’s not really about colonization to them. Maybe they just want to see us gone from the universe as much as we want to be rid of them.
“You must have made a name for yourself among the podheads,” Halley says. “One of the top-dog SEALs coming and asking you personally.”
“I don’t think it’s that,” I reply. “I think they’re at the point where they can’t be picky. He said as much.”
“So you’re going to accept?”
She studies me with an expression that I know to be carefully calibrated to neutral.
“You’d rather I didn’t.”
“Of course I’d rather you didn’t,” she says. “I’d rather have you here with me for a while longer, even if we only see each other on the weekends. That’s much more than most military couples get.”
“But you aren’t telling me I can’t go. You’re not going to resent it if I accept the promotion and go off on that mission.”
“I’ll have plenty of resentment, Andrew. But you know what it is I’ll resent? The fact that you’ll get to do frontline stuff again while I’m stuck in the instructor grind for God knows how much longer. I am tired of teaching and grading and standing in front of a holoscreen with a goddamn wand while others do the jobs they were trained to do. The jobs they’re best at.”
She sighs and pushes her plate away. “But no, I can’t tell you not to go.”
“Sure you can. You’re my wife.”
“And we both chose to wear the uniform,” Halley says. “We chose to keep wearing it when we had the choice. On that rooftop, a year ago, when we had the chance to disappear and join the Lazarus Brigade.”
“We thought about it for days,” I say.
“We really didn’t. I think we both had made up our minds already when we were still up on that roof. We both kept those uniforms on. That means we both agreed to keep dancing to this tune. And we go where they need us, when they need us to.”
“It’s not even a fighting mission,” I say. “It’s a recon run. Against people, not Lankies. And not even against SRA troops. Worst-case scenario, they bag us and take us as POWs.”
Halley gives me that indulging look again.
“Worst-case scenario, they wipe out your recon team. Or they bag you and then decide to line you up against a wall. These people aren’t our own anymore, Andrew. They deserted Earth. All of us, civvies and the Corps. Left us all to deal with the Lankies by ourselves. They catch you on their new home, wherever that is, they’re just as likely to flush you out of an airlock than to waste food and a cell on you. They don’t play by our rules anymore.”
“They’re still people,” I say. “I’ll take my chances with those over Lankies any day. Nobody’s ever been taken prisoner by a Lanky.”
“It’s a combat mission, Andrew.” Halley gets up and carries her plate over to the kitchen nook. She scrapes the little bit of food left on the plate into the protein recycler and puts the plate into the sonic cleaning unit.
“They’re all combat missions,” she continues. “You know that as well as I do. But you want to go. You love that the SEALs are asking you to come along. You want to prove to yourself that you still have what it takes to play around with the tough kids. I understand that. I really do.”
“You would do the same,” I say.
“Damn fucking straight I would,” she replies, without a moment of hesitation.
She walks over to the door of the bedroom and stretches with a yawn.
“I’m turning in early,” she says.
“I thought we’d go over to the RecFac and grab a beer or two before bedtime.”
“You go ahead. I am wiped out. Been doing simulator training all week. Sitting in a chair and looking at screens all day.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah,” Halley says. “Just keep it down to a dull roar when you get back in.”
I know she’s upset, but I also know she’s not upset at me directly, and that I can’t do anything right now except to give her a bit of elbow room and stew a bit on her own. Still, I feel a sense of guilt as I watch her kick off her boots and slide the bedroom door shut behind her.
Halley’s Combat Flight School is just one of the tech schools here on the lunar base, which is as big as any Corps base down on Earth’s surface. The main difference is that there’s no outdoor space, so moving around here feels a lot like moving between a bunch of moored and interconnected starships. I go over to the nearest service hub, which has a chow hall and several recreational facilities. The closest NCO club is almost, but not quite, packed to the last seat, so I take two bottles of soy beer to go—the maximum allowance per head and evening—and drink the first while I’m standing at the bar and looking around.
Most of the personnel in the NCO club are Fleet sailors or SI troops in tech school. All of them are young and green, mostly corporals and three-stripe sergeants, kids that have been in the military for maybe a year or two at the most. They’re here to learn how to fly a drop ship or lead an infantry squad in zero-g EVA combat, or perform any of the thousand other specialties in a modern, spacefaring military. I spot the occasional small cluster of senior NCOs at some tables—staff sergeants, sergeants first class, a
master sergeant or two—but overall, the room is full of troops with brand-new stitching on their rank stripes. These are the most seasoned of the emergency replacements they started to funnel into the Corps right after Mars and the Exodus last year. These kids will be the backbone of the counteroffensive, leading privates and PFCs even younger and greener than they are into battle. And with the planned Mars assault, we are once again willing to risk so many lives on a single roll of the dice.
“Excuse me, Sergeant.”
Behind me, a female corporal walks up to the bar, and I step aside a little to make space. She holds her dog tags out for the bartender to scan. He swipes his handheld scanner over the tags and nods.
“One,” she says. He passes her a bottle of soy beer, and she puts it to her lips and swigs about half the bottle on the spot.
“Been looking forward to that all day,” she says. I turn around to look at her. She’s wearing a Fleet flight suit with corporal-rank insignia, two slanted stripes on each shoulder board.
“Rough day at tech school?” I ask, and she lets out a little snort.
“Rough month,” she says.
“What are you flying?”
“What am I learning to fly, you mean. Retraining for spaceflight on the Wasp. I used to drive a Hornet for HD.”
“And they moved you to the Fleet?”
She nods.
“Interservice transfer. Guess we need more Wasp pilots than Hornet jocks right now.”
“I was an interservice transfer too, once,” I say. “Same direction. Came from HD when it was still called Territorial Army.”
“Wow. That was a while ago. Long before I joined.”
“Not that long,” I protest. “Just a little over five years ago.”
“I was still in middle school five years ago,” she says. “It was a while ago.”
“God,” I say. “Thanks for making me feel like a fucking relic, Corporal.”
“You don’t look that old,” she says.
But you look too fucking young, I almost, but not quite, say out loud. Instead, I just take another swig from my bottle. Then I notice a tattoo on the corporal’s wrist. It’s clearly hood rat ink, the sort you can get in the alley shops down in the PRC warrens for three thousand calories and half a dozen rimfire cartridges. She’s wearing a red number superimposed over a scanner pattern on the inside of her wrist. I know the red number signifies the network node ID of the part of the PRC where she lived. It’s a gang badge. When I was a hood rat, I had many opportunities to pick up a similar decoration and often only barely managed to avoid it.
