by Marko Kloos
“We had that huge airfield,” I reply. “And they used to play motivational music while we boarded.”
“Those were the days,” she replies, with a slight tinge of nostalgia in her voice. “Back when we only had to worry about hood rats with guns, not this deep-space alien invasion shit.”
“Back in the old Corps, things sure were different,” I say in a creaky, old-guy voice, and she laughs.
When all the troopers are in their jump seats inside the cargo hold, we follow up the ramp. We pass through the rows of battle-ready troopers to the front of the hold, where Sergeant Fallon takes a free seat at the top of First Platoon’s row, across from Gunny Philbrick. I take the command chair in front of the bulkhead and plug myself into the console with the data umbilical. The screens turn on and immediately start feeding me status reports.
“All aboard,” the crew chief says. He pushes the control for the tail ramp, which closes quietly. For some reason, this time it makes me think of a lid closing on a coffin.
“Passengers aboard. Verify hard seal on the cargo hold,” the crew chief sends to the flight deck.
“I show hard seal on the hold,” the pilot replies.
The now-familiar muted whine of the Blackfly’s engines starts up outside. The inside of the hold is far more crowded than during the raid on the relay station a few days ago. We have a full platoon on board, and all the jump seats in the hold are taken. In addition, half the empty space between the seat rows and the forward bulkhead is taken up by supply pallets that are strapped to the floor of the cargo hold. I have a pallet parked right behind the command chair, blocking my view of the crew chief, who is manning his own console on the starboard side of the ship.
“Comms and data check, people,” I send to my squad leaders and platoon sergeant. “Let’s make sure the wireless stuff works before we have to go EMCON.”
My squad leaders send back their acknowledgments. Sergeant Fallon adds her own virtual thumbs-up, and I check the data stream from thirty-nine armor computers. Everything is working the way it should, and everyone is in the link, connected to me via low-power wireless data streams.
“Rogue Ops, this is Rogue One Actual. Comms cross-check complete. First Platoon is ready for showtime.”
“Rogue One Actual, Rogue Actual,” Major Masoud sends back from the cargo hold of his own ride. “Copy that. You are five by five on comms and data.”
The company command section is riding with the SEALs in Blackfly Four, which doesn’t come as a big surprise to me. The major and his SEALs have been segregating themselves from the SI platoons all along, and it’s no shock that they’re not going to start mingling with us right at go-time.
Outside in the flight module, klaxons start blaring again, followed by an overhead announcement.
“All personnel, clear the pod for flight ops. Depressurizing pod in t-minus nine. I repeat, all personnel clear the pod for flight ops. Depressurizing in t-minus nine.”
“Anyone need to hit the head before we launch best hurry up,” Sergeant Fallon says to the platoon, and there’s laughter.
At launch time, the flight module goes through the same cycle as before. The air in the module is vented into space all at once when the clamshell doors of the pod open. Then the launch boom extends, and the Blackfly trundles outward on it, carried by the docking clamp overhead. We reach the end of the boom and come to a stop with a slight shudder of the hull.
“Portsmouth Ops, Blackfly One is locked in and ready for launch sequence,” the pilot sends to our host ship.
“Blackfly One, copy. Stand by for remote launch initiation. In ten . . . nine . . . eight . . .”
I think of Halley, who is in the pilot seat of Blackfly Two, on the other side of Portsmouth’s hull and slightly astern from us. She’ll be directly behind us on our trajectory, ten minutes apart. On a normal drop, she’d be well in visual range, and I could probably see her cockpit with enough magnification from the stern camera array, but these are Blackflies, and their polychromatic armor plating will make them practically disappear. Still, I know she’s going to be out there with me.
“. . . three, two, one. Launch.”
We drop free and float away from the hull of Portsmouth. Our pilot increases thrust on the engines and clears the ship by a few hundred meters before he turns the nose around. We pass underneath Portsmouth, and I watch the supply ship continue on its course with the drop ship’s dorsal camera array until she’s just a small black dot, emitting a faint glow from the shielded engine nozzles in her stern.
“Burning for intercept trajectory in three . . . two . . . one. Burn.”
Our pilot fires up the engines for acceleration burn. Once again I am amazed at the low noise level inside the cargo hold. The Blackfly really is quieter at full throttle than all the other drop ships are at idle. Combined with her polychromatic armor, she’s the perfect tool for high-risk commando stuff. I’ve been a podhead for years, and the fact that I’ve never even heard of this new class of drop ship makes me a little anxious. If they could keep these drop ships secret even from the rest of the podhead community, what else is floating around out there with the renegade fleet that we’ve never encountered?
“We’re on the way,” I send to Sergeant Fallon. “Just like old times, huh?”
“Not really,” she replies. “I’m used to breathable air on the outside of the hull.”
The transit to the vicinity of Leonidas c is one of the most taxing experiences I’ve had in my time in the service. No drop ship is designed to make an insertion from that far out, and I’ve never spent this much uninterrupted time in a cargo hold. The troops spend their time talking on private channels or playing the limited variety of diversionary games loaded on their PDPs. At the midpoint of our transit, twelve hours into the flight, we take on fuel from the Wasps to top off our tanks, and the squads take turns unstrapping from their jump seats and stretching their limbs. The Blackfly has a tiny galley and a toilet right next to it, but we are under combat stations and therefore in armor, and nobody is willing to risk a quick death in the event of a hull breach just for the convenience of using a proper toilet instead of the armor’s built-in waste elimination system. Long missions in armor forcing you to take a piss into your armor’s auto-cleaning underlayer aren’t something they mention in the recruiting office or in the war flicks on the Networks.
Leonidas c is an ever-growing presence off our port bow. It’s a big blue gas planet, quite beautiful to look at. The atmospheric swirls and patterns on the planet surface are mesmerizing at high magnification, and I’m glad for something other than inky black space to look at. On the tactical display, the other three drop ships are lined up behind us on our intercept trajectory, roughly ten minutes apart. If something happens to Blackfly One on the ingress, the rest of the platoon will have plenty of warning to avoid the same fate. Without radar and under full EMCON, we are limited to the optical gear, and we don’t pick up anything else in the system at all until the stretched ellipse of our intercept course brings us around Leonidas c a bit.
“There she is,” our pilot sends. “Port bow, three hundred by negative twenty-five. Popping up just over the planetary horizon by the equator.”
I check the optical feed and zoom in on the section of space Lieutenant Dorian pointed out. Leonidas cs3—Arcadia—is just barely visible as it peeks around its much bigger planet.
“Huh,” I say. “It looks like—Earth.”
“It does, doesn’t it?”
Arcadia is a little green-and-blue orb that looks nothing like most other colony moons I’ve seen. It very clearly has an atmosphere—even from tens of thousands of kilometers away, I can see the white patches of sporadic cloud cover.
“Anything on the radar detector?” I ask, even though I have access to that information through my data link.
“Not a thing,” Lieutenant Dorian replies. “I hope we have the right neighborhood. Be a bitch to have come all this way for nothing.”
A warship or
military base can be seen—or more accurately, heard—long before you cross into the range where it can detect you in return. That’s because radar and radio emissions can be picked up from very far away with passive threat detectors. But we’ve been through a good part of the Leonidas system without picking up so much as a whiff of active radiation. Unless the renegade faction has discovered a revolutionary new way to discover far-off threats, they seem to willingly accept blindness in exchange for near-invisibility.
“This is the place,” I say. “Unless they had that relay station set up with the wrong data on purpose. Throw off anyone coming after them.”
“I don’t think that’s likely,” Lieutenant Dorian says. “They’re not keeping quiet ’cause they’re worried about people finding them.”
Ten minutes later, our pilot lets out a satisfied little shout.
“Contact,” he says. “Visual contact, three thirty by negative five. Three . . . five . . . six ships.”
“Battle group?” I ask.
“Big one’s a carrier. Navigator class. Too big to be anything else. Can’t make out the smaller ones yet. And there’s a structure.”
I check the optical feed and pan over the area at maximum magnification. There, in the orbit of that little blue-and-green moon, I can make out a familiar shape. I’ve seen it before, last year, when Indianapolis followed the damaged destroyer Michael P. Murphy on its run from Gateway Station.
“It’s an anchorage,” I say. “Same as the one they left behind in the Solar System. Where we found those battleships.”
The structure looks like two giant letters E joined at the spines, a central axis with six tines jutting outward. All those outriggers have ships docked at their ends, and smaller ships take up the spaces between the outriggers. One of them is definitely a Navigator, the Fleet’s premier supercarrier, which would make that ship NACS Pollux. The other ships are too far away and still too small in the optical feed to positively identify them without doing an electronic IFF interrogation or lighting them up with active radar, which wouldn’t be a wise course of action right now.
“Looks like we found the task force.”
“Most of it,” I concur, glad that we didn’t make a twenty-three-hour trip in a cramped drop ship for nothing.
“Look at them all tied down in anchorage. They’re not expecting trouble.”
“That’s only six. We still have four unaccounted for, plus all the auxiliary fleet freighters they took.”
“Oh, I think we’ll see them around sooner or later,” Lieutenant Dorian says.
As we coast closer to Arcadia, the image of the anchorage becomes clearer with every minute. I let the computer cross-check the visuals of the anchored ships with the list of Fleet units known to have gone with the renegade fleet a year ago. The cruiser-size hull has to be the only cruiser they took along, NACS Phalanx. There’s a frigate that looks small enough to be a Treaty-class ship, which would make her NACS Lausanne, sister unit to our Berlin. The task force has way more combat power in this system than we do, but I’m happy to see that most of it is tied up at the anchorage and inert at the moment.
“That would be a juicy nuke target right there. Six for the price of one,” Lieutenant Dorian says.
“Yeah,” I agree. “If we didn’t need all those ships for Mars.”
“Shame,” he says, with what sounds like sincere regret. “We could—hang on. Contact. New contact on optical, bearing zero-zero-five by positive zero-five-two. Distance one hundred thousand and change.”
A new icon pops up on the tactical display in the cockpit, marking a spotted ship in high orbit above the northern hemisphere of Arcadia. Even with the lenses at maximum zoom, I can’t make out the type or class, just a Fleet-gray hull with position lights blinking.
“Is he flashing station lights?” I ask.
“Yep,” Lieutenant Dorian replies. “Full Christmas tree. Not getting any active radiation from him, either. He doesn’t want to be heard, but he sure doesn’t give a fuck about being seen.”
I look at the trajectory projection for the newcomer to see if he’s on an intercept course. He’s not headed our way, but he’s not aiming for the anchorage, either. With every passing minute, we get closer to Arcadia and our orbital insertion. I know that Lieutenant Dorian does not want to risk a corrective burn and give us away on infrared or whatever else the renegades have aimed at the approaches to Arcadia, but we also don’t want to get too close to a patrolling unit, polychromatic armor or not.
“It’s one of those new frigates,” he says after a few minutes. “Those Greek underworld ones.”
“You sure?” I consult the optical feed again to look at the hull of the patrolling ship, now a few ten thousand kilometers closer.
“It’s the right size. And the shape looks off for a Treaty.”
When the renegade fleet made their escape, they left behind the two unfinished battleships that are now Agincourt and Arkhangelsk, but they also had a trio of frigates nobody had ever seen or heard about before—Styx, Acheron, and Lethe, identified through their IFF transponders by the Indianapolis when we discovered the renegade anchorage. We know very little about these frigates and their capabilities, but if they were meant to be escorts for those battleships, they’re built to go up against Lankies. As I look at the far-off maybe-frigate on the optical feed, silently coasting along in front of the blue-and-green backdrop of Arcadia, I wonder just what kind of new surprises they kept secret over the years.
“Orbit insertion in forty-six minutes,” Lieutenant Dorian says. “Going to aerobrake and see if we can set up orbit on the other side of the moon from that station. I don’t want to have to use the burners to slow us down.”
The drop ship needs to slow down for a stable low orbit, and since we can’t fire the engines to counterburn on the way in, the only other option is aerobraking, using the friction from atmospheric entry to slow us down gradually. As stealthy as the Blackfly is, we can’t hide the superheated plasma that surrounds and flares behind us like a fiery rooster tail as we start skipping through the first dense layers of Arcadia’s atmosphere. Anyone looking our way with enough magnification will see the light show, and the ships following us in ten-minute intervals will light up the sky again in the same obvious fashion.
“Hitting atmo,” I inform the platoon, quite unnecessarily. The drop ship is buffeting and bouncing roughly as we descend at the fastest safe rate, bleeding speed and kinetic energy. Pod landings are rougher still, but in a pod, you can’t get bounced against anything, so it seems less jarring. By far the most shoot-downs and accidents occur in this phase of an orbital insert, when the ship is on a fixed trajectory and very visible. I scan the threat sensors obsessively, even though they’re almost useless while the drop ship is ensconced in superheated plasma. Finally, after what seems like an eternity but took less than thirty minutes according to my suit’s chrono, most of the buffeting stops, and we are soaring through a deep-blue sky, with the stars above us and the blue-green surface of Arcadia below. The horizon in the distance has a pronounced curve to it at our altitude, and there’s an iridescent light blue band of atmosphere shining on the far-off boundary between moon and space.
“We’ll be below the line of sight horizon to the anchorage in seven minutes,” Lieutenant Dorian says. “We should be able to get the rest of the flight on near-field comms.”
“Copy that,” I say. “Just give the word when we’re in the clear.”
A hundred thousand feet below us, the colony moon spreads out like a surreal tapestry. It looks like one of those environmental holograms they project onto the walls in the RecFacs or medical facilities to relax people and let them pretend there’s an unspoiled world beyond. Arcadia isn’t a frozen ball of ice and rock like New Svalbard, or a craggy, brown-and-red desert like Fomalhaut’s SRA-owned moon or precolonization Mars. There’s blue water and green land, mountains and rivers, the sun glistening off hundreds—thousands—of bodies of water, lakes and streams and seas. And there
isn’t a single trace of human activity anywhere—no contrails crisscrossing the skies, no lights or exhaust plumes, and no permanent smog haze over most of the land below. Instead, we are cruising above a broken cover of white clouds. I share the video feed with the platoon just so they can see what they’re about to drop into. Imaginations can run a little wild when you’re descending into hostile territory in a windowless cargo hold.
“Look at that,” Sergeant Fallon says. “It’s friggin’ paradise. Never seen anything like it. No wonder most of the welfare rats want to win the colony lottery.”
“Most of ’em don’t look like that,” I say. “None of them do, actually. None that I’ve ever set foot on, anyway.”
The other three drop ships enter the moon’s atmosphere in five-minute intervals behind us, each trailing bright and obvious tails of fire on their way down. On the way into low orbit, our flight was neatly lined up, but aerobraking in the upper layers of the atmosphere isn’t a precise way to slow down. By the time Blackfly Four has made the transition into atmo, our flight is dispersed in a rough diamond formation, with more than a hundred kilometers between us.
“Threat detectors still showing zip,” Lieutenant Dorian says. “No active radar, no radio traffic, no nothing.”
“Maybe they all dropped dead, and we can just waltz in and call the Fleet for a pickup,” I offer.
“Wouldn’t hurt my feelings any.”
A few minutes later, Lieutenant Dorian chimes in over the shipboard intercom channel again.
“We’re in the radio shadow of the anchorage, and there’s nothing on the scope. I’d say we’re safe for low-power tight beam comms.”
I send a coded message to the rest of the flight, a two-digit number that takes a millisecond to transmit. A few seconds later, we get three separate transmissions back.
“Rogue Actual, this is Rogue One Actual. The threat board is green. Transmitting tactical now.”
Our ship is in the lead, so our optical sensors can see a good hundred kilometers further into the distance than those of the following ships. Our Blackfly’s computer sends its sensor information to the three other ships in a millisecond burst.
