by Marko Kloos
“Fucking swamps and sand fleas,” Philbrick says. “We wipe out every species on this planet, those things’ll be the last ones standing. Give me the Green Mountains over this any day of the week.”
“I like the mountains,” I concur. “There’s something about the ocean, though.”
“What brings you out here? Pretty sure you didn’t come all the way to the ass end of Lejeune to talk geography. Not that I mind the diversion today.”
“I see they have you hitting the live range.”
“Yeah, finally. Got a bunch of new privates who never got to fire live rounds until today. We’re conserving resources, see. At least we almost have a full battalion now.”
“You know we are heading to Mars soon, right?”
Philbrick folds his arms in front of his chest and looks out over the ocean. Then he turns his head away from me and spits into the sand by his feet.
“I suspected as much. Been drilling mostly LHO tactics for the last few weeks. There’s no official word from division yet, but you know how the lance corporal underground works.”
“Only thing faster than light speed is the rumor network,” I say, and Philbrick grins.
“We’re not ready,” he says. “We weren’t ready a year ago, when we got our asses kicked. We sure as shit aren’t ready now.”
“But we’re going anyway.”
Philbrick looks back toward the firing range, where his new privates are hammering apart harmless polymer Lankies with explosive gas rounds.
“Gonna end up collecting a lot of dog tags,” he says.
“What if we can keep that number down?”
He looks at me and raises an eyebrow.
“And how do you propose we do that? A new gunnery sergeant and a new second lieutenant? Did they hand you the key card to the strategy room at Defense?”
“There’s a mission in the works,” I say. “I signed up for it because I think it may tip the scales for Mars.”
“Do tell,” Philbrick says.
I describe the visit from Major Masoud in as much detail as I can. When I’m done, Philbrick laughs and shakes his head.
“Figures,” he says. “Always some podhead shit going down ahead of the main event. One company?”
“It’s a scouting run,” I say. “We don’t need to bring enough to beat them down. Split the platoon by squads and fire teams. Four-man recon teams with heavy weapons for backup. Fast and mobile, in and out.”
“Far away from home,” Philbrick says. “No supplies except what you bring along. And if you get discovered, you’re in a world of shit.”
“In other words, just like old times,” I say, and he laughs again.
“Maybe for a podhead like you. Ain’t going to be a ship in orbit, I’m guessing. This will be a long-range recon thing. And I mean really long range.”
“I’ve done it before,” I say. “And when the darts start flying, does it really make a difference if your evac ride is a thousand or a million kilometers away?”
“You know it doesn’t. But why are you coming to me with this? You sure as shit don’t need advice from an E-7.”
“I am putting together my own command team for the platoon. I need squad leaders who know what the fuck they’re doing out there. Someone I can trust.” I hold up my left hand and wiggle my fingers.
“You want me to be one of your squad leaders?” Philbrick asks.
“Affirmative,” I say. “I know you’re above rank for the job, but this isn’t going to be a cookie-cutter recon platoon. Everyone’s going to be senior rank for their slots. Except me, I guess.”
“Shit,” he says. “I’m assistant platoon sergeant for this outfit now.”
“These aren’t your troops from Indy,” I say.
“No, we got broken up and reassigned. I have a few people from the old crew. Humphrey and Nez. The rest are new. I’m locked into that slot right now, though.”
“SOCOM has a ton of pull. If I can make the reassignment happen, will you take the slot?”
Philbrick looks over to the live-fire range again and purses his lips.
“I can’t leave my guys alone,” he says. “Been through too much. The green privates, they’re not going to give a shit if the platoon gets a new gunny tomorrow. But I can’t just up and leave Nez and Humphrey with them.”
“What if I can get them transferred, too?”
Philbrick doesn’t answer for a while. At the range, the staccato of heavy-caliber gunfire continues, the echoes rolling across the dunes like thunder in an intensely angry storm.
“Train for another few months, and board the bus for Mars,” I say. “Hope it all turns out. Or come with the recon team and play for higher stakes.” I feel a little bit like I’m recycling Major Masoud’s talking points trying to sell this mission, but I know that Philbrick is as tired of garrison duty as I am, and I know he’s as flattered to be asked to join as I was when Major Masoud asked me.
“At least it ain’t Lankies,” he says. “And there isn’t a grunt left in the Corps who would pass up a chance to take it to those chickenshit cowards.”
“So you’re in?”
He drops his shoulders with a sigh.
“Yeah, I’m in. But only if you get Nez and Humphrey in as well. You get me that, I’ll take a squad. Let you boss me around.”
“Outstanding,” I say, trying not to show my relief.
“You have the other squad leaders squared away already?”
“No, you’re the first one,” I reply, and he laughs.
“Who else? Anyone I know?”
I tell him the name of my other candidate, and he laughs again, but this time his laugh has a distinctly incredulous note to it.
“You have got to be shitting me.”
“Not even slightly. You two are not going, we’re not going.”
“Holy hell.” Gunny Philbrick shakes his head. “There’s no way they’ll let you do that.”
“Watch and see,” I tell him. “Watch and see. And pack your gear bag just in case.”
CHAPTER 12
Last year, right after the PRCs exploded in the wake of the Exodus, the maglev rail system suspended all traffic into or out of the PRCs out of necessity. The Lazarus Brigades asserted control over the Clusters one by one after that, and the new government was more than happy to let them. But it took months for the transportation arteries to go back to some semblance of the pre-Exodus normality, and a lot of them still aren’t fully tied back into the network. If you want to make it into Detroit, you’ll get as far as Toledo, Ohio, which is as far as the maglev goes now. And the closest Homeworld Defense air station to Toledo is my old duty post of Fort Shughart in Dayton.
I have the strangest déjà vu when I step off the shuttle on the landing pad in Dayton. I was here, seven years ago, gearing up on the drop ship pad just across the taxiway, on a hot and muggy summer night that is still vividly seared into my memory. Our company went out to quell a food riot, and my squad came back with two of us in body bags and most of the rest wounded. I never got to come back here after that night. They ferried me to Great Lakes Medical Center, and I was discharged from what was then the Territorial Army while I was still at the hospital. I went straight from Great Lakes to my new duty station for Navy indoctrination, and never even got to say good-bye to any of my old squad mates.
Shughart is all the same except in one critical aspect now: The 365th Autonomous Infantry Battalion is still here, but Sergeant Fallon told me last year that my old platoon got dissolved and dispersed all over the brigade in the wake of a minor mutiny. The hard cases, like Sergeant Fallon, got shipped off to a penal battalion of sorts, and then into exile to far-off New Svalbard from there. The rest were dispersed and slotted into line companies all over the continent. I don’t know where Hansen, Priest, and my other squaddies are right now, or if they’re even still alive. I do know that Stratton and Paterson are resting in little stainless steel cremation cylinders, filed in tiny burial plots in the memorial halls of thei
r respective hometowns. The 365th is still here, in the same building, but it’s a different unit now, with a new commanding officer and unfamiliar faces in my old platoon. I could stop and visit, but it would be pointless. Some of the old-timer NCOs may still be there and recognize me from my six-month stint with the 365th seven years ago, but the people that would have been glad to see me are no longer here. Seven years ago, we were all together on this airfield, joking around and boarding the drop ship that would take us to disaster, but now they are just ghosts of the past to me, and I to them.
I never left Shughart when I was still stationed here because I never had a reason. There’s a tube station right by the main gate that feeds into the Dayton public system. The train cars are old and beat to shit, but they run. I scan my military ID at the ticket computer and drag my alert bag onto the next city-bound train with me.
At the Dayton station, I switch platforms from the military-only level to the public system. Upstairs, where the civvies intermingle with the uniformed HD troops and cops, the station looks like a PRC street market. It’s far busier and livelier than the last public transport station I visited, back home in Boston over a year ago. There are still civilian police all over the place, but they wear only light armor, not full riot gear, and the atmosphere isn’t as tense and hostile as I remember Boston last year. I check departure tables and go up the stairs to where the fast maglev trains depart. At the top of the stairs, a civilian police officer checks my ticket slip and waves me through.
“You’re not going to scan my ID?” I ask. They usually check ID to make sure you’re the same person who printed the slip at the ticket computer, to keep military personnel from buying free rides for friends and dependents.
“Scanner’s broke,” he says. “No worries. Where you’re going, nobody in their right mind goes in uniform ’less they are legit.”
The maglev ride from Dayton to Toledo only takes half an hour. It’s early in the evening, and the summer sun is setting outside. I’m tired and want to use the opportunity for a nap, but the knowledge that I’m getting four kilometers closer to the Detroit metroplex with every passing minute keeps me just anxious enough that sleep won’t set in despite my bone-deep fatigue. On the other side of the scuffed and stained polyplast windows of the maglev train car, the streets are still lined with single- and two-story houses, but I know that soon enough, I’ll pass that threshold between the old suburbs and the new PRCs, that demarcation line between tenuous order and controlled anarchy, and then the buildings will get progressively taller and filthier. I see my own reflection in the window, and my face looks as tired and shopworn as the faded and fraying cloth covering of my seat.
The train glides into the Toledo station and comes to a slow stop that has an air of finality to it.
“Toledo Terminus,” a computer announcement says from the address system in the train car ceiling. “This is the final stop on this line. All passengers are required to disembark. I repeat, all passengers are required to disembark. This is the final stop.”
I know that the line used to go all the way into Detroit before the Exodus, but things have changed since then. I gather my alert bag and line up in the aisle with the rest of the remaining passengers who have business in Toledo or beyond. Everyone else in this maglev car is a civilian, and they all look as tired and beaten down as I do. There’s something about being this close to a PRC that just saps the cheer and the energy out of most people.
The military and police presence here in the Toledo terminus is heavier than it was in Dayton, and the station doesn’t have the same market square atmosphere to it. Instead, the civvies go about their business past small groups of policemen and HD troops, and the ones out here are in heavier gear. Some of them eye me curiously as I make my way through the station with my alert bag on my back, and I do my best to appear unconcerned. This is the atmosphere I’m used to from the pre-Exodus days, distrustful cops on edge safeguarding what remains of orderly state functions here on the edge of official NAC control.
At the exit door to street level, there’s a checkpoint set up, half a dozen HD troopers with sidearms and PDWs manning a cordon funnel and checking IDs. I step up to the line of guards and hold out my military ID for them to scan.
The sergeant who scans my ID looks genuinely concerned.
“Sir, are you sure you want to leave the secure area at this hour? It’s almost 2100 hours.”
“How far does the secure area extend?” I ask.
“Hundred-meter perimeter around the station, right up to the riverfront. Everything on the other side is militia-controlled. You go out that set of doors and across the bridge at the other end of the transit plaza, and there’s a militia checkpoint on the other side. They won’t let you through armed and in cammies.”
“I’ve got a pickup waiting,” I say. “I’ll be all right, Sergeant.”
The sergeant shrugs and hands my ID card back to me.
“If you’re positive, sir. We won’t be able to do much if they decide to detain you, though. Their turf over there.”
I stick my ID card back into my document pocket and try to look confident.
“Can’t wait until the morning, Sarge. Pressing business.”
“Must be some top-level shit, sir. Sorry,” he adds after a moment.
“It is some top-level shit,” I say. “Trust me, I wouldn’t go out there by myself if I didn’t have to. I’m not a dipshit.”
I walk through the cordon funnel and head for the doors. When I reach them, I take a brief look back at the HD troopers manning the checkpoint, and most of them are watching me and talking amongst themselves in low murmurs. The sergeant who checked my ID gives me a nod, but I can tell by his expression that I do in fact qualify as a dipshit in his opinion. I take a deep breath and step through the automatic doors and out into the evening air.
Walking across the bridge into the militia-controlled part of the city is an almost surreal experience. There are forty-story buildings lining the riverbank on both sides, and I hear and see the noisy pulse of a large city all around me, but the bridge itself is dark and quiet. I am the only pedestrian crossing the water right now, and I feel uncomfortably exposed out here in the dark. Above the city, the streetlights are illuminating the cloak of haze that hangs over the city.
On the other side of the bridge, there’s another checkpoint. This one is made up of waist-high concrete barriers. There’s a squad of militia troops standing guard out here, all in the same olive-drab uniforms adopted by the Lazarus Brigade. They look anachronistic in their fatigues, with the rank insignia of the old pre-NAC United States Army, but their common equipment makes them look a lot more professional than the ragtag band of armed civvies that ambushed my platoon just a few dozen kilometers north of here seven years ago.
As I approach the checkpoint, I make sure I keep my hands away from my sidearm or the alert bag on my back. Whether they are antiques or not, I am greatly outnumbered and unarmored, and if things get sporty with these militia guys, I’ll be hugely outgunned. But they all just look at me with mild curiosity, not hostility. Things have changed since last year, it seems.
“Good evening,” I say when I am in hailing distance. The squad leader wears the old insignia of a sergeant on the sleeves of his olive-drab fatigue jacket, three chevrons pointing up. To my surprise, he sketches a salute, albeit a perfunctory one.
“Evening,” he says. “What brings you to our side of the river, Lieutenant?”
“I hear the food is better,” I say, and some of the militia troopers nearby laugh.
“No, it ain’t,” the sergeant says.
I look at the way he carries his rifle, suspended from a single-point sling and hanging diagonally in front of his body. He has his finger properly indexed alongside the trigger guard.
“You prior NAC service?” I ask.
He nods. “Two years HD.”
“I’m here to see someone,” I say. “I was told to ask you to contact this network node and tell the
m that Lieutenant Andrew Grayson is asking for a pickup.”
I pull my PDP out of my pocket, unlock it with my fingerprint, and show the screen to the militia sergeant. He looks at the device with mild surprise.
“Deion,” he says to one of the other militia troopers. “Get on the link and send a message to node 679-Alpha. Tell them there’s a Lieutenant Grayson from Fleet asking for passage.”
“Copy that,” the trooper says and walks off toward the nearest alley mouth behind the barriers. Maybe a minute later, he returns.
“They’re sending a ride for you, Lieutenant. ETA forty-five minutes.”
“Any place I can sit while I wait?” I ask.
The sergeant points to the nearby concrete barriers. I sigh and take off my alert bag. Then I walk over to the nearest barrier and sit down in front of it, too tired to care or argue.
A little over an hour later, two noisy military vehicles show up at the end of the street on the militia-controlled side and roll toward the checkpoint. They’re ancient, gasoline-burning designs straight out of a military history book, utility all-terrain vehicles of the kind that were once used by the army of the old United States. They’re square and flat-bottomed, with large, knobby, honeycomb tires. There’s a gunner standing up in the roof hatch of each vehicle, and they are both manning pintle-mounted automatic guns with air-cooled barrels. The small column comes to a halt twenty meters short of the checkpoint, and the headlights from the lead all-terrain illuminate the scene harshly until the driver kills the lights. The doors of the lead vehicle open, and three militia troopers climb out. I recognize the one from the passenger seat right away.
