by Marko Kloos
“Want to come and take a look?”
“I’d love to,” I say.
I get a powerful sense of déjà vu as I walk down the main spinal passageway with Halley. In all our years in the Fleet, we have never actually served on a ship together officially since Versailles, seven years and several lifetimes ago.
“Whoever’s in charge of this run must have a lot of pull,” Halley says to me.
“Major Masoud is in charge of the ground component,” I say. “Berlin is coming along as our bodyguard. Lieutenant Colonel Renner.”
“It’s like reunion week,” Halley says.
“Oh, you don’t know the half of it. Why do you think the major has pull?”
“Because you kids are getting the very best battle taxi in the Fleet. In any fleet.”
“Dragonflies?”
“No,” she says. “Not Dragonflies.”
We walk back into the mission module space of Portsmouth. Halley leads me down to the ventral passageway, where I know the SEAL platoon is quartered in a crew module just like the one my own platoon occupies. She checks the status display next to one of the access hatches to verify that the module is pressurized and unlocked. Then she opens the hatch and gestures for me to follow her through.
“Whoa,” I say when I step into the module.
The module is mostly open space, a miniature hangar with an automated refueling station and service carts lining the bulkhead. There’s a docking clamp mechanism on the ceiling, a smaller version of the ones I’ve seen in flight decks all over the fleet. Sitting on the deck in the middle of the hangar module, and taking up most of it with its considerable size, is a very large and unfamiliar drop ship. It has some resemblance to a Dragonfly, but it’s quite a bit bigger, and it looks about five times as mean, which is no mean feat considering the aggressive looks of the Dragonfly class.
“What in the hell is that?” I say. “I’ve never seen one of these in seven years in the Fleet.”
“That is a Blackfly,” Halley says. “Don’t bother looking it up on your PDP. They don’t exist.”
“SOCOM project,” I say, and she nods.
“We brought four. That’s half the existing inventory. They belong to the Special Operations Aviation Regiment.”
There are maintenance personnel working on the bird in front of us. The refueling probe is latched on to the fuel port in the wing root, and I can see the thick umbilical of a service line snaking underneath the ship and terminating in a port hatch on the underbelly. The ship is all black, but it isn’t the rough, nonreflective paint they slapped onto Portsmouth to make her low-observable. This hull is almost mirror-smooth, and something about the way it reflects the light from the overhead fixtures looks familiar.
“Polychromatic armor plating?” I hazard a guess, and Halley nods.
“Same stuff they use for the HEBA suits. It’s made for long-range special operations insertions. Fast, agile, and freaking invisible.”
“How long have those things been in the Fleet? I’ve never even heard rumors about them, and I’ve done a shitload of drops with SOCOM.”
“The 160th used modified Dragonfly birds for their drops until this year. These just came off the assembly line maybe six months ago.”
“So they’re not battle tested,” I say.
“The prototypes have a few combat drops,” she replies. “Trust me, they do what they were built to do.”
“And how is it that you know about these and I don’t?”
“Because I’m one of the pilots who’s checked out on that type,” she says. “Most of the rest are eating lunch over in the officers’ mess right now. We have more of these birds than we have pilots who are cleared to fly them.”
The Dragonfly drop ships are aggressively angular and look like they’re spoiling for a battle. This Blackfly has a much more streamlined hull, all curves and very few angles, but somehow it looks meaner still. The windows of the cockpit are smaller than on the Dragonfly, their edges are rounded, and the polyplast—if that’s what it is—has been coated with an opaque layer that makes it impossible to see into the cockpit itself. On the Blackfly’s underside, I see the telltale seams of ordnance bay doors, all faired into the body and fit so tightly that I have to look very carefully to see the general shape of the doors, stretched octagons with rounded corners.
“That’s going to make a really small radar target,” I say.
“You have no idea,” Halley says. “It has the radar cross section of a fucking wedding ring.”
“Can’t shoot what you can’t see.”
“Precisely. I’ll take a stealth profile over bigger guns any day of the week. Of course, she does have some big guns, too. Retractable chin turret, triple chamber autocannon mounts on each side of the centerline, and internal bays for fireworks.”
“And we have only eight of these,” I say.
“They each cost about as much as four Dragonflies,” Halley says. “And they’re so classified, I’ll have to kill every surviving member of the platoon once the mission’s done.”
“Any idea which platoon you’re ferrying?”
Halley shakes her head. “We just got here. Got orders to grab chow and stand by, and that’s it.”
“Well,” I say, and look at the lethal lines of the hulking drop ship that takes up most of the aviation module we’re standing in. “If this mission fails, it’s not going to be for a lack of kick-ass gear.”
“Now hear this,” the 1MC blares overhead. “Platoon leaders, pilots, and senior NCOs, report to briefing room Delta at 1100 Zulu. I repeat, all platoon leaders, pilots, and senior NCOs, report to briefing room Delta at 1100 Zulu.”
I check my chrono, which shows 1014 Zulu.
“Let’s get back to the chow hall and grab breakfast,” I suggest. “And then we can go and find out where and when we’re going to die this time.”
“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Operation Paradise Lost.”
Major Masoud is standing at the lectern in front of the briefing room, elevated on a little dais. The briefing room is one of the nicer ones I’ve seen in the Fleet, comfortable reclining chairs set up in a stadium fashion, each row a little higher than the one before it. A huge holoscreen takes up most of the wall behind the major, and he touches a control on his lectern to bring the display to life. It shows the seal of the ship for a few moments until it changes to the SOCOM logo.
“We are a day out of Gateway, and our remaining assets have arrived at the assembly point and are being squared away at present. We had to get out of observation range and to a SOCOM assembly point because the neighborhood doesn’t need to know what kind of toys we’re putting onto Portsmouth.”
Sergeant Fallon and I are sitting in a row with the leader of Second Platoon, Lieutenant Wolfe. We’ve barely had time to get to know each other in the day since we cleared moorings at Gateway, but Lieutenant Wolfe seems all right. The two SI lieutenants commanding Second and Third Platoons have stopped by more than once for a chat or to get advice, and I suspect it’s because they’re at least somewhat starstruck by Sergeant Fallon, whose Medal of Honor makes her a member of the military’s most exclusive and prestigious club. Only Captain Hart, the leader of the SEAL platoon, hasn’t been around much since we met in Portsmouth’s ops center yesterday. He disappeared to wherever they berthed his SEAL platoon, and I haven’t even seen him in the mess at chow time yet.
“Situation. We are about to enter the target system, where a renegade faction of the former NAC government has fled with a substantial percentage of the remaining NAC fleet. We don’t know what awaits us on the other side of the transition, but we do know which units are involved in the treason.”
He brings up a list of ships on the screen behind him, along with hull numbers and small 3-D models that slowly spin in place.
“They are the destroyer Michael P. Murphy, the cruiser Phalanx, the frigates Acheron, Lethe, and Styx, and the carrier Pollux. They also took along twelve freighters from the au
xiliary fleet, transporting unknown cargo—most likely passengers for resettlement. In addition, they have two fast Fleet supply ships, the Hampton Beach and the Manchester.”
One of the officers lets out a low whistle.
“That’s an awful lot of tonnage to go up against,” I tell Sergeant Fallon in a low voice. With the Corps scraping the bottom of the barrel for ships, we’d be very hard-pressed to match that renegade force in combat power in a head-to-head engagement. We have more ships now, but they’re mostly fifty-plus-year-old frigates and cruisers, and a few ancient carriers from the mothball fleet.
“Needless to point out,” Major Masoud continues, “we cannot hope to force them into a stand-up fight and represent enough of a threat to make them surrender.”
Most of us laugh at this, and Major Masoud smiles. Every time he does, it looks like the gesture is causing him physical discomfort.
“So we are going to do what SOCOM does best. We’ll fight dirty. We’ll sucker punch and keep hitting below the belt.
“Mission. We will transition to the target system. We will gather intelligence for a future assault by the rest of the Corps, and conduct prestrike preparations to facilitate future action. And if the situation turns out favorable, we will plan and execute hit-and-run raids on essential military infrastructure.”
There are some murmurs of approval in the room. Major Masoud changes the holoscreen over to a much shorter list of ships.
“Assets. The flagship for this mission is NACS Portsmouth, an AOE-class fast Fleet supply ship. Our combat escort, NACS Berlin, is on the way and will rendezvous with us in three hours.”
That’s it? I want to voice out loud, but I manage to keep it in my head instead. One of the other officers in the room has no such inhibitions.
“We’re taking a forty-year-old frigate as our combat power against a reinforced modern carrier task force, sir?”
“We are,” Major Masoud says.
The new round of murmurs in the room sounds considerably less approving than the one before.
“We can’t match them for hulls or gun barrels,” Major Masoud says. “And even if we could, it would mean a bloody fight and a lot of destroyed ships. So we go in light. The smaller the force, the harder it is to spot. Berlin has more than enough firepower to deal with any minefields or picket ships we may stumble across. Any more ships would be a liability, not an asset. Keep that in mind: we are not going up against a modern carrier task force. We’re going up against all the stuff they’re trying to guard.”
He changes the screen again, this time to a schematic of Portsmouth.
“And I believe I told Lieutenant Grayson yesterday that this ship has a few tricks up her sleeve. Portsmouth spent almost a month in our SOCOM fleet yard before she docked at Gateway. Allow me to point out a few enhancements.”
The schematic of Portsmouth changes to an outside view of the ship. The hull looks very different from the standard Fleet gray paint scheme. It’s a rough, pebbled black that looks like the Portsmouth took a dip in a mud puddle before drip-drying.
“Ideally, she would be wearing polychromatic hull plating right now, like the new Orbital Combat Ships,” Major Masoud says. I feel a twitch of sorrow at the thought of Indianapolis and her skipper.
“But we didn’t have the time or resources for that kind of refit. So we did the next best thing. Portsmouth is wearing a coat of nonreflective, radar-absorbent paint. You can’t hide a ship this size as well as a tiny little OCS or corvette, but you can make her a lot harder to spot.”
The image on the screen changes back to a schematic. Portsmouth has the same general flattened cigar shape of most other Fleet ships, but three-quarters of her length are dedicated to cargo and supplies.
“As some of you will know, the new AOEs are fully modular. Portsmouth has sixteen mission pods.” He points them out on the screen. “Eight each on starboard and portside, four pods in each quadrant of the hull.”
The pods on the schematic detach from the rest of the ship and fly outward. Without the pods in their recesses on the hull, Portsmouth looks a lot like the skeleton of a fish—big head, but nothing but bones and ribs beyond that until you get to the tail end. Where a fish would have a rear fluke, Portsmouth has its engineering module with the fusion rocket propulsion system.
“These modules can be swapped out and configured any way the mission requires. We have about half of them full of supplies—food, water tanks, fuel, and ammunition. Four are configured as crew quarters for your platoons. Four are for our aviation assets. And two are holding special surprises courtesy of SOCOM research.”
“What kind of aviation assets, sir?” Lieutenant Wolfe asks.
“One drop ship per platoon,” Major Masoud says. “We are bringing along four brand-new Blackfly covert-ops drop ships. You are most likely not familiar with them, but I guarantee you that you will come to love them intensely.”
“How are we going to launch four drop ships off an AOE? The hangar deck on this thing is tiny.”
“That is correct,” Major Masoud says. “Portsmouth’s hangar deck doesn’t have the space for the drop ships we are taking along.”
“So how are we taking them along? Are we strapping them to the hull?”
There’s some muted laughter in the room, but Major Masoud doesn’t join in.
“We are taking them along in cargo modules,” he says. “And when it’s time, we can launch all four of them at the same time without the help of Portsmouth’s hangar. We are launching them directly out of their modules.”
He zooms the display in on one of the cargo modules on the screen and taps a sequence onto the control pad in his hand. The cargo module turns to reveal a sliding hatch in its side. As we watch, the doors retract, and a boom with a drop ship hanging off it extends through the opening in the module. Then the doors close behind the extended boom, and the drop ship detaches and flies away.
“We developed these for special operations,” Major Masoud says. “They’re standard cargo modules adapted for autonomous flight ops, to give force-projection capabilities to ships that usually don’t have any. We can launch drop ships out of these modules, and we can retrieve them. It’s nowhere near as fast as launching from a proper flight deck, but it beats the hell out of strapping them to the hull. And we can launch all four ships at once without having to waste time waiting for one hangar clamp to cycle through the launch procedure four times.”
“Sneaky,” I murmur to Sergeant Fallon. “Son of a bitch turned a fleet oiler into a tiny assault carrier.”
There are general sounds of approval coming from the room. I look over at the SEAL captain, who’s sitting all the way on the right side of the room, leaning against the wall next to him with arms folded in front of his chest. He doesn’t look the least bit excited or surprised. I conclude that none of this is news to him.
“Execution,” Major Masoud continues. “As soon as we rendezvous with Berlin and the aviation assets are in the barn, we are making best speed to the transition point. We will refuel and make a combat transition under maximal EMCON. Once on the other side, we will assess the tactical situation and begin our scouting run.”
“Where exactly is ‘the other side,’ Major?” I ask. “Or is that classified until after the transition?”
“I was waiting for someone to ask.” The major allows himself a thin-lipped smile. “The big secret. The one that took us a year to figure out. Where they went.”
He clears the schematics from the display behind him and brings up a new screen, this one a chart of a star system. I’ve been all over the colony systems for half a decade, but I’ve never seen this particular system map.
“They went to the Leonidas system.”
The room erupts in conversation that’s definitely above the common courtesy level for briefings, but Major Masoud just watches the small crowd assembled in the briefing room without comment.
“Sir, Leonidas is an unsettled system,” Halley says. “That’s a hundred and fif
ty light-years away. It hasn’t even been remote-surveyed yet.”
“Correct on one count, Captain,” he replies. “It’s a little over a hundred and fifty light-years away, yes. But it’s not unsettled, and hasn’t been for a while now.”
As far as I know—as far as everyone knows—the furthest expansion of human colonization before the Lanky invasion was at Tau Cygni B, not quite seventy light-years from Earth. We’ve never made it any further into space, and that colony fell to the Lankies three years ago, with the loss of three hundred thousand colonists and a reinforced battalion of Spaceborne Infantry. I’ve never even heard rumors of a colony so far out past the Thirty, more than twice as far as what we’ve been told was our outer limit.
“That is where they went, without a doubt,” Major Masoud continues. “And that is where we will go in eighteen hours if Berlin and the second supply ship are on time.”
One hundred fifty light-years, I think. In the cosmic scale of things, it doesn’t really matter whether we’re ten or a hundred light-years from Earth—both are right around the corner and an eternity away, depending on your perspective. But something about that number seems unsettling. When I was in combat controller training, we had to do survival exercises in a deep indoor pool designed for dive training. I’ve been in pools hundreds of times in my life, but standing on that tower and looking at the water below knowing that the bottom of it was over a hundred meters deep instead of just five or ten made a difference to my primate brain. If our Alcubierre drive fails while we’re in system, we’ll never make it back home alive, not even going at fractional c while in cryosleep.
“Questions,” Major Masoud says.
“Sir,” Halley says. “What if we reach the Leonidas system and find it crawling with Lankies?”
“Then we will consider the problem solved and transition out again as fast as we can spool up the Alcubierre drives,” Major Masoud replies. “Our job is not to engage Lankies. Our job is to scout and lay the groundwork for reclaiming NAC assets for the Mars offensive. If we show up and the Lankies own the place, we can safely assume there aren’t any NAC assets left in that system to reclaim.”
