Lines of Departure

^{CHAPTER 11} THE FATE OF THE TASK FORCE

“Well, that’s a shitty end to this day,” the platoon sergeant says.

I can’t help but chuckle at what has to be the understatement of the decade. Everyone is cross-talking on the platoon channel, so I open a private channel to the lieutenant.

“LT, we need to call the drop ship down and get the fuck off this rock, right now.”

“Orders say to sit tight and go defensive,” the lieutenant replies. “If that’s a Lanky ship up there, we’d climb right up into the middle of a shootout.”

“Look.” I splice off the feed from the Manitoba’s CIC and send it through the private data link. Our fleet units are splitting two ways, like the small SRA task force we engaged earlier. The carrier and one of the destroyer escorts are moving out of orbit, away from the Lanky ship, and the Hammerheads and the space control cruiser are shielding the Manitoba’s retreat. The space between our ships and the advancing Lanky seed ship is a sea of missile icons—the three cruisers are emptying their magazines at the new arrival. Together, they carry a few dozen megatons of nukes, enough firepower to turn a small moon into an irradiated wasteland, but Lanky seed ships are incredibly tough, and nukes aren’t a quarter as effective in hard vacuum as they are in a planetary atmosphere.

“They’re trying to make the chute, and the cruisers are going to buy them time. If we’re still dirtside in another five minutes, they’ll be out of reach, and we’ll be breathing CO2 in another month. They won’t come back, sir. They won’t risk another task force for a lousy regiment or two. You know it.”

“They get blown out of space, we die with them, Sarge.”

“They make Alcubierre, we’re safe. Otherwise, we’re dead, one way or the other. It’ll just take a few days longer, that’s all.”

“Fuck.” The lieutenant doesn’t deliberate for long before he cuts the private link and speaks up in the platoon channel.

“All right, cut the yapping. We are bugging out. Mark a spot for the bird. We’re getting out of here while we can. Banshee Two-Five, come on down for evac.”

“Copy that. ETA thirty seconds.”

We mark a clear spot for the drop ship and wait for our taxi, mindful of the Chinese civilians who are still loitering on the perimeter, unsure of the sudden burst of activity on our side. With my TacLink, I have a real-time picture of the battle overhead, and knowing the extent of our troubles, the thirty seconds until the arrival of our drop ship feel like three weeks. Then Banshee Two-Five comes descending out of the darkening blue sky, makes one low pass overhead to eyeball the landing spot, and sets down gracefully right on top of our markers.

I’m part of the rear guard, and I keep my weapon trained on the Chinese civvies as the first half of our decimated contingent runs over to board the Wasp. In front of me, I see forty or fifty locals in the narrow streets beyond the ruined admin building. Most of them are just watching us, but some of them have worked up the courage to yell insults or throw debris in our direction.

You poor bastards, I think. Survived our guns and our bombs, and now you’re all going to die anyway, either by Lanky nerve-gas pods or by choking like fish on dry land.

I don’t speak enough Chinese to inform them of their fate, but even if I knew more than the few phrases we learned in fleet training—stuff like stop, surrender, go fuck yourself—I wouldn’t take the time to tell them. They’ll know soon enough, if the nukes going off in high orbit didn’t already make things clear. We don’t use atomic arms against the SRA, and they don’t use them against us, because it’s bad policy to start irradiating the very same resources you’re fighting over. The only time we use nuclear warheads is when we go up against the Lankies.

“Second element, move, move, move!” the platoon sergeant calls out. I trust the other half of the platoon to watch my rear, and turn around to run for the tail ramp of the drop ship idling a hundred meters away. In the pile of rubble to my right, the bodies of our platoon mates still lie buried and unclaimed, in the spots that will have to serve as their graves until we can come back to reclaim Sirius Ad from the Lankies, who will own the place completely in another month.

I run up the ramp, strap into a seat in the cargo hold, and look out of the back of the Wasp. As the tail ramp rises up, my last view of Sirius Ad is that of a gaggle of Chinese civvies swarming over the rubble that was their government’s local outpost, and it feels like I’m leaving a prison full of death row inmates, with the executioner striding into the place just as I’m walking out.

While we’re climbing back into orbit, I have nothing to look at except for gray-painted bulkhead, and nothing to do but to tighten my seat straps, so I stay glued to the tactical screen. The battle overhead is a shootout between profoundly unequal adversaries, our best technology employed against an enemy so advanced that we might as well be hurling rocks and sticks instead of twenty-megaton warheads for all the damage we’re failing to do. Our cruisers are between the Lanky ship and the retreating carrier, pumping out salvo after salvo of antiship missiles, but the trajectory of the seed ship isn’t changing as it shrugs off our warheads. The Manitoba and her two escorts are leaving the neighborhood at maximum acceleration, but the Lanky ship has a lot of momentum, and the cruisers aren’t even slowing it down.

We climb into low orbit at full throttle, but our progress feels agonizingly slow. With every minute our ship is clawing for more altitude, the carrier and her bodyguards are increasing the distance. When I finally feel the weightlessness of orbital flight lifting me out of my seat and into the harness straps, the Manitoba is almost a quarter million kilometers away. The Lanky seed ship is much closer.

“Ain’t no way we’re going to catch up,” the crew chief says to us from his jump seat by the forward bulkhead. “Not unless they slow down a bit and let us close the gap.”

“If we don’t, we’ll just go back dirtside,” Lieutenant Benning replies. “Can’t get fucked much worse than we are right now anyway.”

As if on cue, the pilot chimes in on the intercom.

“Brace for evasive.”

The ship pitches and rolls in the low gravity. We’re blind and deaf in the cargo hold, unaware of the threat that made the pilot put the craft into an evasive pattern, and the lack of control and awareness is almost worse than being stuck in a bad firefight. I scan the shipboard data nodes, and tap into the Wasp’s external video feed. For a few moments, I see nothing but distant stars careening across the dorsal camera’s field of view, but then the pilot straightens out our trajectory, and the feed of the wide-angle lens shows a piece of the battle in progress nearby.

Off our starboard bow, one of the Hammerhead cruisers is in a spin, bleeding air and frozen fluids out of hundreds of holes in its outer hull. Just beyond the cruiser, the massive bulk of the Lanky seed ship pushes its way through the hastily erected blocking position. The Lanky ship is enormous, a glistening oblong shape that looks like a cross between a seedpod and a rifle bullet. It dwarfs our cruisers, which look like sparrows trying to attack an eagle. I know that a Hammerhead is almost four hundred meters long, and the seed ship looks to be at least five times that size. I’ve seen drone shots of the seed ships in many intel briefings, but this is the first time I am looking at one through a direct camera feed, and the sight of it makes me want to crawl into my armored boots. All three of our cruisers are tattered, with hull damage I can spot even through the fish-eye lens of the dorsal camera from hundreds of klicks away, but the Lanky ship has no visible scars on its seamless black flanks. The Hammerheads are our newest capital ships, supermodern fleet defense cruisers that can hold their own against an entire SRA task force, but the Lanky seed ship just brushed two of them aside without even putting on the brakes.

The pilot changes our trajectory to catch up with our fleeing carrier, and the new camera angle points away from the Lankies and into the space between Sirius Ad and our clandestine Alcubierre transition point. I’m not an astrogator, but I can read movement vectors and do some relative speed calculations in my head, and it’s pretty clear that the crew chief is right—there’s no way we’ll catch up with the Manitoba and her escorts, and our pilot is pushing the Wasp as fast as it will go already. Our carrier is running away at full acceleration, trying to make Alcubierre before the Lanky seed ship catches up and hammers our hundred-thousand-ton flagship into scrap.

“What a fucked-up day,” the platoon sergeant says to no one in particular.

Without the hint of a warning, the rear cargo door of the drop ship disintegrates. The concussion of an impact slaps through the ship like the shock wave of a grenade. Something fast and superheated tears through the troop compartment from back to front and then bores through the bulkhead on my right. There’s violent decompression in the cargo hold as all the air gets vented through the wound in the drop ship’s outer hull. My suit automatically seals itself and turns on its own oxygen feed as I get whipped around in the straps of my seat. The back of my head makes contact with the hull behind me, and even with the padding of my helmet, the impact is enough to make me see red stars in front of my eyes. The sudden chaos in the cargo hold is complete—everything that wasn’t strapped down is getting blown around. With the air gone, there’s no sound coming from my external audio feed, and the silence lends a surreal quality to the event. When my vision returns and my world slows its spin, I reach for the rifle next to my seat out of pure habit, only to find that my M-66 has disappeared, torn from its storage bracket.

The cargo hold is a scene of utter carnage. Whatever blew through the rear hatch tore through the ship from tail to nose at a slight angle from right to left of our centerline. Bits and pieces of bulkhead armor, seats, webbing, and people are rushing past my eyes on their way out of the rear of the ship. I look to my left to see that we are trailing a comet tail of debris and frozen oxygen. The row of seats across the aisle from me is no longer there, and neither are the people who were strapped into them just a few moments ago. Half the cockpit bulkhead to my right is torn away, and instead of seeing into the drop ship’s galley and head that should be beyond the shattered bulkhead, I look into empty space. The armored door to the cockpit is gone, and the area in front of it looks like we ran nose-first into the Manitoba’s armor belt at top speed. From the movement of the stars beyond the massive holes in our hull, I can tell we’re in a spin.

Some of the troopers are calling for help on the comms now, but everyone’s cross-talking, yelling and shouting in shock and fear. The cargo bay has two rows of seats, one on each side, and I’m near the front of the starboard side. The entire rear half of the starboard-side seat row has been torn out of the ship, with nothing but mangled metal and shredded hull lining remaining where the Lanky projectile plowed through the Wasp. Half the port-side seats are gone as well, everything from the wing roots in the middle of the ship all the way to the cockpit bulkhead. Sheer luck of the draw has placed me in one of the spots that didn’t get pulverized by millions of foot-pounds of kinetic energy. In the long run, it won’t matter—the ship is destroyed, and we’re in a very high orbit over Sirius Ad. All our fleet units are either engaged in battle, destroyed, or running away from the Lankies, and there’s nobody out there to stop and pluck me out of the wreckage.

Against my better knowledge, I toggle into the pilots’ intercom channel.

“Banshee Two-Five, you copy?”

There’s no answer, of course. I strain forward in my seat straps, unwilling to release the harness lock and risk getting flung out of the back of the ship, and peer around the corner of the doorway in the cockpit bulkhead. The armory nook is still there, and the right side of the cockpit looks relatively undamaged, but the left side has been hammered into a pulp. The left seat is missing altogether, and the right seat is occupied by a pilot who is slumped over sideways in his seat. His head is gone, along with most of his neck, and little frozen blood bubbles are drifting out of the smashed cockpit and into space like a cloud of tiny pink balloons.

“Headcount,” one of the squad leaders says on the platoon channel. “Sound off if you’re still alive.”

I check my tactical screen for suit telemetrics and find that I’m one of four people still alive in the cargo hold. There are two more still strapped into their seats, but their vitals are flat—a suit that didn’t seal in time, a piece of high-velocity shrapnel through the helmet. Half a dozen live troopers are floating in space outside the hull, getting left behind like dumped cap-ship garbage as the Wasp’s inertia carries it further out of orbit.

“Grayson here,” I reply. “Check your oxygen levels and hang on to something solid. I’ll try to get Fleet on emergency comms.”

“For what it’s worth,” the squad sergeant sends back. “Hope they hear you. I got two hours of air in my suit.”

I check my own oxygen supply, and it’s not much better. Three hours and thirteen minutes at present rate of consumption, the suit’s computer informs me in unnecessarily precise fashion. The tanks in our suits are low-capacity reserves designed for emergencies in hard vacuum, like a drop-ship hull breach on descent, but the designers assumed that rescue units would be close by. Battle armor makes lousy extra-vehicular activity gear—the joint seals aren’t the sturdiest, and a nick from an enemy fléchette means that your three-hour supply of air becomes a five-minute supply. The bug suits have much bigger oxygen systems because they’re designed for fighting on high-CO2 Lanky worlds, but my own bug suit is in a locker in my berth on the Manitoba, which is now almost half a million kilometers away.

I fire up my comms suite again, turn the transmitter to full power, and start broadcasting the news of our impending death.

“All fleet units, all fleet units. This is Tailpipe Five on Banshee Two-Five, type Wasp. We have suffered a catastrophic hull breach and are coasting ballistic. Both pilots are casualties. We have four survivors in the hull, and six more outside. Declaring an emergency.”

I listen for a reply, but all I hear is the hiss of an unused carrier wave. I repeat the broadcast three more times, but nobody out there is willing or able to respond.

“Well,” the squad sergeant says. “That’s that, then.”

“Anyone have any weapons left?” one of the other survivors asks.

“Yeah, Goodwin. I got my rifle,” the sergeant replies. “Why, what are you going to do with that fucking pellet gun out here?”

“I got two and a half hours of air left,” Goodwin says. “Two hours and twenty-nine minutes comes around, I’m gonna borrow your rifle for a second if you don’t mind, Sarge.”

“I’ll be dead by then, girl. You’re welcome to it at that point.”

“’Preciate it, Sarge,” Goodwin says with lighthearted politeness, as if the sergeant had just agreed to trade z-ration desserts with her.

“What a fucked-up day,” the sergeant says, echoing the words of the platoon sergeant who was sitting across the aisle from me, and who probably died in a millisecond when the Lanky penetrator rod tore through the ship.

We drift in the darkness in silence, reflecting on that epitaph. I conclude that as far as last words go, the platoon sergeant did pretty well.

Floating in the dark, silent hull of our wrecked drop ship, there is no up or down. Without the chronometer of my helmet display, I wouldn’t be able to gauge the passage of time at all. I send out the same emergency broadcast every five minutes, but half an hour after the death of Banshee Two-Five, nobody has acknowledged our calls for help. My suit’s low-frequency data link to the fleet has stopped real-time updates, and my tactical display is showing only best-guess positions. Both our Linebackers are flashing emergency beacons, and the Hammerhead space control cruiser has disappeared from the plot entirely. The Manitoba has traveled beyond the range of my tactical map, along with the Lanky seed ship. We are alone in space above Sirius Ad.

The cooling elements in my suit are working overtime to keep my body heat from boiling me in my armor. My air is good for another two and a half hours, and the battery pack will run the suit for another day or two before everything shuts down. I wonder if I should leave a last message in the memory banks of my armor’s tactical computer, one final good-bye to Mom and Halley maybe, but then I decide it would be pointless. Sirius Ad’s gravity will snare the wrecked drop ship sooner or later, and then we’ll burn up in the atmosphere. Some bits and pieces of us might survive, but even if we ever retake the Sirius A system, nobody’s going to mount a search for a few dog tags and some charred memory chips.

Forty-five minutes after my initial call for help, another emergency beacon pops up on my screen, with a vector marking indicating that the ship in distress is far outside my display’s scope. Then the TacLink network connection drops altogether.

“Well, shit.”

“What’s the matter, Grayson?” the other sergeant wants to know.

“We lost the Manitoba. Her crash buoy just popped up.”

There are groans of despair from the other troops. The Manitoba didn’t make the Alcubierre chute in time. Nobody will know about our fate until our task force is overdue at Gateway and they send someone to look for us. Between the carrier and the three cruisers alone, we lost ten thousand people today, and another five thousand infantry grunts are trapped down in the dirt on Sirius Ad, waiting for their inevitable extermination by the new masters of the system. I have no idea how many civilians will be added to the total by the time the Lankies have finished the takeover, but it’s an old colony, settled half a century ago—a million or more settlers, third-generation off-Earthers at least.

I’m twenty-six years old. For the last five years of my life, I have served the Commonwealth wherever they sent me. I have lost count of the number of people I’ve killed—directly, with my rifle, or indirectly, by calling down air strikes and close air support on them. I’ve ordered nuclear strikes on Lanky towns, and I’ve shot our own citizens, in the welfare riots back in my TA days. All of it has steered me toward this fate—to suffocate in the wrecked hull of a drop ship, high above a second-rate colony we never planned to keep anyway, or to end it all with a quick rifle shot.

I think of Halley—the first time we met, on the first day of Basic, bunkmates by the luck of the alphabet—and I feel a profound gratitude for the interrupted, hectic, and strange relationship we’ve had, intense and exciting despite all the obstacles thrown into our path by an uncaring military. I think of Mom, and about the sadness she will feel at the loss of her only child, but I’m glad that we got to spend some time together just before I shipped out on this particular goat rope.

I conclude that I have no regrets, and that I’d do it all again, in exactly the same fashion, if I had the choice. If my life was short, at least I managed to live the last part of it on my own terms.

At the hour mark, when my air supply is down to a little over two hours, I turn up the transmitter again.

“All fleet units, all fleet units. This is Tailpipe Five, on Banshee Two-Five. We are dead in space, and running out of oxygen. Anyone left out there, please acknowledge.”

I don’t expect a reply, and when I hear a static-speckled voice responding to my distress call, I flinch so hard with excitement that I hit the back of my head on the hull behind my seat.

“Tailpipe Five…Nassau. Copy one by five. Say position.”

“Nassau, we are above Sirius Ad in a wrecked Wasp, and our suits are running dry. Sending nav data right now. Got anything you can send our way?”

“Tailpipe Five, that’s a negative,” the reply comes after I have sent the burst transmission with our coordinates. “We are forty-five minutes from Alcubierre, and there’s a Lanky between us and you. Sorry,” the comms operator adds.

The Nassau is the frigate escort of the minelayer that peeled off the task force right after our arrival in-system. She has her own drop ships, but if they’re less than an hour from the transition point, they are over four hours from our position. Even if they came about and headed our way at full acceleration, we’d be dead by the time they got here, and their captain is not going to go back where a carrier and three cruisers just met their end. I swallow my disappointment at having this new spark of hope extinguished.

Then there’s a new voice on the emergency channel, clear and loud and impatient.

“Nassau, belay that. Come about and prepare the flight deck for inbound traffic. This is the CAG, Manitoba.”

I check my tactical display for the source of the new transmission, and see a formation of four drop ships climbing out of Sirius Ad’s atmosphere. The lead ship bears the designations CAG and CO 4/5 RGT—Commander Air Group and Commanding Officer, Fourth Regiment. The first boat in the formation has both the Manitoba’s air group commander and our infantry regiment’s commanding officer on board, two of the highest-ranking people in our task force. I want to hold my breath to stop any extraneous sounds, so I won’t miss a word of the new message traffic.

“CAG Manitoba, Nassau. We are unable to reverse course. We’re forty-five minutes from transition.”

“Nassau, CAG Manitoba. I see you on the plot, fella. Decelerate and loiter by the transition point. I have a four-ship flight stuffed with troops here. We can pick up Tailpipe Five and his entourage on the way, and catch up with you in four hours.”

“Sir, there’s a Lanky seed ship on our tail, in case you aren’t up on current events.”

“I can read a plot. The Lanky isn’t accelerating anymore. We can dogleg it around their position. Why am I even talking to you? Get me Nassau Actual, right fucking now.”

There’s a ten-second silence in the channel, and a new voice comes on.

“CAG, this is Nassau Actual.”

“Lieutenant Colonel Carignan, I’d very much appreciate it if you’d decelerate and give us time to catch up.”

“Pete, you’re asking me to risk my ship here. Did you see what happened to the Manitoba? I have no desire to add us to the casualty list.”

“The Lanky is on a reverse course, and nowhere near you. Wait near the transition point, and if that seed ship moves in against you, get out and leave. Otherwise, let us try and sneak around the Lankies and over to you. I have a hundred people on these ships, and you’re the only unit left that can make Alcubierre.”

The Nassau’s captain lets another ten seconds elapse before he responds to the request.

“Colonel, I can’t do that. My first responsibility is my crew.”

“Okay, then,” the CAG says, and his voice is flat with anger. “Let me rephrase that request. We have four Dragonflies here, and a total of sixteen standoff nukes between us. Do as I suggest and decelerate to wait for us, or I’ll launch every last fucking missile I have. They may not catch up with you in time, but that’s your bet to lose, mister. Those nukes do fifty gees sustained acceleration, and that old bucket of yours makes a fat target.”

I can barely suppress a laugh into the shocked silence that follows the CAG’s threat. Colonel Barrett, the commander of the Manitoba’s air group, has a reputation for abrasiveness, and it seems that the prospect of being abandoned in a Lanky-controlled system has excised whatever sense of diplomacy he had. I have no idea if the CAG is merely bluffing, but I sincerely hope that he isn’t. The long-range standoff nukes on the Dragonflies are not really meant for antiship use, and the point defenses of a carrier would intercept them long before they got into range to do harm, but the Nassau is just an old frigate, and sixteen half-megaton warheads would saturate her point-defense system.

“You’re threatening to shoot nukes at my ship? Are you out of your fucking mind? You know I’ll have you locked up and court-martialed,” the Nassau’s captain finally replies. He sounds every bit as pissed as the CAG now.

“Yeah, we’ll worry about that shit later,” Colonel Barrett sends back.

“You have four hours,” Nassau Actual says. “We’re decelerating. If you’re not in the docking clamp by then, we transition out. If the Lanky starts moving our way, we transition out without you. Understood?”

“Good enough. CAG out.”

Nassau’s captain does not bother to send a final end-of-transmission phrase.

In the darkness of our shattered drop-ship hull, I let out an exuberant cheer.

The flight of Dragonflies homes in on our dead Wasp, and the ten minutes of orbital maneuvering feel like ten hours to us. The Dragonfly drop ships have EVA airlocks for special ops, so we have a way into the ships without forcing their passengers to de-atmo the hulls. Still, without proper EVA suits, and with the last zero-gravity training session a few months behind me, changing ships in high orbit is a thrill I could do without. Under normal circumstances, the scene outside would be a breathtaking sight—the streamlined and lethal Dragonfly attack drop ship, position lights blinking, matching trajectories with our wreckage with the red and brown expanse of Sirius Ad below us as a backdrop. I mostly have eyes for the EVA hatch on the Dragonfly, a small target twenty yards beyond the destroyed tail ramp of our Wasp. When I push off, I miscalculate my trajectory and tumble toward the hatch too high, but the Dragonfly’s pilot fires his thrusters for a fraction of a second and expertly catches me with the hatch like a catcher plucking a ball out of the air with his mitt. A few moments later, the EVA hatch closes again, and I hear the rush of ingressing air as the crew pressurizes the hatch compartment again. The drop ships don’t have artificial-gravity gear like the big starships, so I have to hold on to the webbing that covers the inside of the hatch compartment to keep from careening around in the interior like a pea in a can.

“Hang on for about twenty seconds, trooper,” someone says over the intercom. “I’ll open the troop hatch as soon as the pressure is back to normal.”

“You got it,” I reply. “No rush.”

In the weightlessness of high orbit, I can’t feel the acceleration of the ship directly, but when the pilot revs the engines again, the increased vibrations transmit from the hull right into the webbing I am grasping. On my tactical screen, I can see our four-ship diamond formation detaching from the symbol that marks the dead Banshee Two-Five, and then heading away from Sirius Ad at maximum acceleration. With nothing left between us and the distant Nassau but a four-hour flight and a Lanky seed ship to avoid along the way, I shut down my tactical screen. If we make our escape, I’ll owe my life to a drop-ship pilot for what seems like the fiftieth time, and if the Lankies intercept us, I don’t want to have a countdown to my impending death again.

When we dock with the Nassau a few hours later, I expect to see a security detachment on the flight deck to escort us straight to the brig, but the Nassau’s captain seems to have decided to save the court-martial business for later. When we file out of the troop bay, our only welcoming committee is the chief of the deck, who waves us on impatiently. The Nassau’s little hangar is made to hold two combat-ready drop ships and two standby spares, and with four of the huge new Dragonflies cluttering up the deck, the ships are now parked wingtip to wingtip.

“All hands, prepare for Alcubierre transition. I repeat, all hands prepare for Alcubierre transition. Countdown one-five minutes.”

With almost a hundred new arrivals on the tiny frigate, the ship is now overstuffed with people and gear, and there are no seats for us to strap into. We sit down wherever we can claim a few square feet out of the way. I find a corner in a storage room, peel off my helmet, and sit down on the oil-stained floor to await our transition into the Alcubierre chute.

When we transition for the trip back to our own solar system, we leave behind a carrier, a destroyer, and three cruisers, lost with all hands. On Sirius Ad, we abandon the better part of two full Spaceborne Infantry regiments, thousands of fellow troopers who aren’t geared to fight the Lankies that are about to descend upon them. Even if they evade the Lankies on the ground, every human being on that planet will succumb to the newly unbreathable atmosphere in another two months at the most. We pulled off a textbook planetary assault, won all our battles on the ground, and suffered the worst military defeat of NAC forces in half a decade—ten thousand dead in thirty minutes, another five thousand about to die, and the Lankies in possession of a system that is just seven light years and a single transition away from our homeworld.

I have talked to hundreds of fleet Medical Corps shrinks after combat missions. We get a psych eval every time we come back from a drop with casualties, to make sure nobody’s going to snap and shoot up a mess hall or eat a rifle round. The psych hacks always ask the same questions, so they can get the answers that will let them make check marks in the right places on their eval forms. A lot of them are concerned about survivor guilt—the notion that we combat grunts beat ourselves up mentally for having survived battles that claimed our friends and comrades by the job lot. It’s all a bunch of horseshit, as far as I’m concerned.

As we enter the chute, and the Alcubierre field around the ship makes every molecule in my body develop a low-level ache, the only guilt I feel is for being relieved at not being among the poor bastards on the ground, my comrades in arms who are now facing certain death at the hands of the Lankies. But I don’t feel any guilt for having escaped that fate, and I know that most of the troops we are leaving behind wouldn’t feel any guilt for surviving in my stead, either.