Lines of Departure

^{CHAPTER 13} MIDWAY, DEPARTING

The Midway is a relic, a loose confederation of parts flying in vaguely carrier-shaped formation. When I arrive at my new duty station, there are still swarms of civilian fleet yard techs everywhere, hammering the ancient carrier back into fighting condition. Everywhere I look, there’s evidence that the Midway had a long and rough life in the fleet, and that she didn’t get the benefit of a final overhaul before being mothballed. The lining on the deck floors is shot, the paint on the bulkheads is old and faded, and the whole ship smells like a long-disused storage locker. I look around for some redeeming feature, but after a few hours on board, the best thing I can say about the old warhorse is that her hull still seems to be mostly airtight.

“I know what you’re thinking,” my new commanding officer says. His name tag says MICHAELSON. He’s a captain, not a major like all my other COs. The special-operations company on a carrier is usually headed by a staff-officer rank, but the fleet seems to be running out of even those.

“I’m not getting paid to think, sir,” I tell him. “That’s for the ranks with the stars on the shoulder boards.”

I take stock of the cloth badges on the captain’s fatigues. I’ve never met him in the fleet, but he looks vaguely familiar, and he has the proper credentials—SEAL badge, drop wings in gold, all the right specialty tabs, and a SpecWar badge on the black beret tucked underneath his shoulder board. The fact that he’s in battle dress instead of Class A rags is somehow comforting.

“Yes, I’m active duty,” he says when he notices my glance at his patches. “I’m the new CO of the SpecWar company on the Midway. Such as it is.”

“If you don’t mind me saying, sir, I’m surprised they assigned a full company of podheads to this tub.”

He gives me a curt smile and folds his hands across his chest.

“Me, too, Sergeant. In any case, we’re only a full company on paper right now. You and I are it at the moment, until the rest trickles in. I’m supposed to get two SI recon platoons, two Spaceborne Rescue guys, and a team of SEALs.”

“How many more combat controllers, sir?”

“They promised me two more, but so far, you’re your own team.”

“I’ll need all new gear, sir. My junk burned up with the carrier we lost at Sirius Ad. Bug suit, uniforms, everything.”

“Sirius Ad?” the captain repeats, and leans forward with sudden interest in his eyes. “Holy shit. You were one of the ones who got out of there?”

“Yes, sir. Me and about a hundred mudlegs from SI. Four drop ships’ full.”

“They just put the news on MilNet three days ago, just before all the movement orders got canceled. It seems they’re reshuffling the whole damn fleet. I was Earthside for an instructor tour at Coronado. Hadn’t even sorted my shit into the locker when my new orders came through. So much for six months on Earth.” He leans back in his chair and puts his feet on the desk. His boots are well worn, but spotless. “You are one lucky son of a bitch, Sergeant. If I end up going dirtside on this deployment, I’m going to stay close to you.”

“I wouldn’t, sir,” I reply with a smile. “I’ve used up all my luck last week. Things go to shit, I’ll probably be the first to buy it.”

He rasps a laugh.

“Go find your berth and get settled, Sergeant. We’ll have a company powwow once the rest of the crew gets in. I’d direct you to the supply group, but I just got here myself, and I’ve never been on a Pacific-class before. Just ask one of the yard monkeys.”

The Midway is a relic, but her berthing spaces are roomy. I have nothing to put away, since all I have with me is the uniform set I borrowed from the supply sergeant on the Nassau, so claiming my berth is just a matter of walking in and punching my name and rank into the security panel at the hatch.

When I finally locate the Midway’s supply-and-logistics group, the sergeant sitting behind the clothes- and kit-issue counter looks familiar. We both look at each other in dawning recognition, and then the supply sergeant snaps his fingers and points at me.

“Fleet School,” he says. “You were in my platoon. Grayson, right?”

I read his name tag, and my brain finally sorts him into the right spot.

“Simer. You were at the other end of the platoon bay. How have you been?”

“Oh, you know,” he says, and shakes my hand. He looks a bit soft around the edges, evidence of a career mostly spent sitting at a desk or folding laundry. “Ship-hopping every six months, just like everyone else. Although I have no clue what I fucked up to get posted to this bucket. What can I do for you?”

“I lost all my kit when my last ship went down,” I say. “I need the basic set again, the whole sheet.”

“I’ll see what we have in the back. What’s your MOS?”

“One Charlie Two Five One.”

“Combat controller? Holy crap. I thought you were off to Neural Networks School after Great Lakes.”

“I was. It’s a long story. I sort of switched tracks along the way.”

“Yeah, I guess you did.” He picks up a data pad and consults the screen. “Truth be told, I don’t know half the shit I have right now. Things have been a bit nuts. They’re all trying to do three weeks of pre-deployment work in three days.”

He flicks through a few screens on his pad.

“You guys have a ton of specialized shit I’ve never even seen. I have all the standard gear for sure, but I don’t have any HEBAs. They don’t issue those in the regular supply chain.”

“Yeah, they fit those at the issue point.”

“I’ll put a request into the system anyway. Maybe they’ll get one ready for you Earthside before we leave Gateway.”

“Any idea where we’re going? I haven’t heard anything from the brass yet.”

“They’re all mum about it. But I will tell you one thing.” Sergeant Simer looks around, and then leans toward me and lowers his voice. “There’s some weird shit going on. I see the stuff popping up in the supply logs, and I’ve never seen that kind of pre-dep loadout.”

“Like what?”

“Well, for starters, we got three times as much food as we need for a six-month cruise. And they’re filling all the missile tubes with nukes. I’ve never seen so many nuke supply codes come through the system at once. Someone upstairs must have cracked open a big-ass warehouse full of megatons.”

I grimace at this revelation. The fleet only goes heavy on nukes when we go up against the Lankies, and just a week after Sirius Ad, I don’t want to go near Lanky-controlled space again already, especially not with all my good gear missing.

“Food stockpiles, nukes in the tubes…sounds like we’re in for a shit sandwich.”

“Maybe we’ve found the Lanky homeworld,” Sergeant Simer offers. “Maybe we’re headed downtown into Lanky Central.”

“You better hope we’re not,” I say, and shudder at the thought of transitioning into a system crawling with Lanky ships. I remember the sight of the solitary seed ship, taking on our entire carrier task force without getting its hull scratched. Just one of their ships wiped out 5 percent of our entire fleet in less than forty-five minutes, including three of our biggest and newest warships. A dozen of them could probably go through our whole fleet like a fléchette through a block of soy chicken.

We’re about to run our heads against the same unyielding barrier, and once again, the brass seem to have concluded that our approach isn’t working because we’re not running at the wall fast enough.

As big as the Midway is, the fleet manages to fill it up with people and gear quickly. Two days after my arrival, the supply crews have filled every storage room on the ship to the ceiling, and navigating the fore-and-aft gangways and corridors becomes an exercise in weaving between pallets and gear pods stacked along the walls. Even the carrier’s flight deck, the only open space on the ship big enough for running, resembles an overstuffed storage shed at a maintenance depot.

“They’ll turn this boat into a supercarrier by weight if they don’t stop stacking shit on every flat surface,” Captain Michaelson says as we observe the hustle and bustle on the flight deck on the third morning of the Midway’s hurried deployment preparation. We came down to the flight deck to get in a few miles before breakfast, but I doubt that even the most efficient ballistics computer in the fleet could plot a clean course through the mess in front of us. There’s a flight of drop ships parked over to one side of the deck, like a quartet of barely tolerated guests, and the rest of the flight deck is a sea of cargo containers, munitions pallets, and fuel bladders.

“Those drop ships are ancient,” I say, and point at the cluster of olive-green spacecraft. “Wasp-A. You don’t even see those in the fleet anymore. I thought they had all been upgraded or junked by now.”

“I’ll bet you anything all this gear is from the strategic-reserve stockpile. Looks like it’s all or nothing.”

At the far end of the flight deck, some supply crews are erecting what look like SI field tents. Several neat rows of them are already standing, and from the number of tents laid out on the deck beyond, it looks like the supply guys are putting together a tent village big enough to quarter an entire regiment of Spaceborne Infantry in full kit.

When I see Sergeant Simer walking nearby, a data pad in his hand and a harried look on his face, I wave at him to flag him down.

“Hey, Simer,” I say. “What’s up with Tent City back there? Are we picking up refugees?”

“Fucked if I know,” Simer shrugs. “They said to get ’em up before we deploy. Rumor has it we’ll get a bunch more passengers along for the ride. As if we don’t have this thing loaded up to the gunwales already.”

“Any guess on where?” the captain asks me when Simer walks off again.

“Nukes in the tubes, enough tents for a regiment on the deck, and everyone’s in a rush,” I say. “I hope the brass have their priorities straight, and we’re going back to Sirius Ad to kick some Lanky ass.”

“That would be good and proper,” Captain Michaelson agrees.

And that’s how I know we’re going somewhere else, I think.

If we launch in the next few days and haul ass back to the Sirius A chute at maximum acceleration, we can make it back just in time to get our people out before the Lanky terraforming turns the place into a toxic pressure cooker. If we would only join forces with the SRA for once instead of fighting over the leftovers, we could even kick the Lankies off that rock and save what’s left of the civvie population.

I remember the faces of the podheads that dropped with me on that mission. I wonder if Macfee, my fellow combat controller, survived the initial Lanky onslaught, and if he’s hiding out with an SI squad somewhere on Sirius Ad, waiting for the rescue ships he already knows won’t come in time.

“If that’s not where we’re going, I’m going to look at alternative employment,” I say.

Captain Michaelson looks out over the mess that is the hangar deck, his expression unreadable. “If that’s not where we’re going, we should start loading flag officers into those missile tubes,” he replies.

He looks at me and smiles curtly, as if he had just realized that he shouldn’t have voiced that thought in the presence of a noncom.

“God knows they’re dense enough. Shoot a pod full of generals into a Lanky ship, you might actually do some decent damage. Sure as shit won’t be a loss to us either way.”

We get our first look at the tenants of Tent City at lunch, when we sit in the crowded NCO mess near the flight deck. I’m sitting with my back to the hatch, and when I hear a sudden increase in conversation buzz behind me, I turn around to see a group of troopers stepping into the room. They’re all wearing standard NAC camo fatigues, but the berets tucked underneath their shoulder boards aren’t fleet black or SI maroon. Instead, they’re a subdued shade of green.

“Homeworld Defense? What the fuck are they doing here?”

The new arrivals look around with that particular expression of subdued anxiety that’s exclusive to grunts in a new and unknown environment. They spot the back of the chow line and walk over to claim their spots. Except for the color of their berets, they are every bit as hard-edged and lean as our SI troopers.

“You have got to be kidding me,” Sergeant Simer says next to me. “I’ve never seen any HD on a fleet ship, not in five years of service.”

“I haven’t, either.”

“Looks like we’re really down to the dregs this time, eh?”

“Hey.” I shoot him an unfriendly look, and Simer raises an eyebrow. “Can the shit talk, Simer. I was HD before I joined the fleet.”

“No kidding?”

“No kidding. Back when it was still the Territorial Army, before all the unified service bullshit.”

The newcomers are keenly aware of the fact that most of the people in the room are staring at them, but they ignore the attention. After a minute or so, the novelty has worn off, and the noise level in the room returns to its regular mealtime volume.

I eat my lunch while half-listening to the conversations around me, and keep an eye on the HD troopers that end up clustering at a table near the hatch. When they get up to stow their meal trays, I do the same and head for the hatch at the same time.

I loiter in the hallway outside until the HD sergeants come out of the mess room. They walk down the corridor in small groups, still looking out of place and unsure, like kids in a new school on the first day. The last HD trooper out of the hatch is a sergeant, one rank below me, but close enough to negate rank etiquette. I fall in beside him as he walks off to follow his comrades.

“Sergeant, wait up.”

He gives me a reserved smile.

“Staff Sergeant.”

“What’s Homeworld Defense doing up here in space? I thought you guys don’t do hard vacuum.”

“I guess we do now,” he shrugs.

“Andrew Grayson,” I say, and offer my hand. “I was TA for a few months, back when I joined. 365th AIB, out of Dayton.”

“No shit?” He shakes my hand. “John Murphy. I’ve never heard of a TA grunt going fleet.”

“Yeah, it hardly ever happens. I was lucky. Or unlucky, depending on your point of view.”

He looks at my chest pockets, the cursory glance of the military man checking out someone else’s cloth patch credentials, and his gaze lingers for just a moment on my Master-level combat-drop badge, identical to the one he’s wearing.

“365th, huh? They’re still around. We did a drop with them a few months back. We’re the 309th, out of Nashville.”

“You guys run out of shit to do down there?”

“Hardly.” Sergeant Murphy lets out a brief snort. “We do three drops a week inside the periphery these days. You wouldn’t think those welfare shits had anything left to burn in there, but it’s a fucking war zone every ration day.”

“I dropped into Detroit with the 365th once. Five years of combat drops on the colonies since then, Lankies and all, and I’ve never been as scared as I was that night. Almost had my tag punched, too.”

“Detroit,” he says. “Boy, that’s the master shithole right there. What happened?”

“Squad got chewed up bad. I got stitched with an M-66, two of our guys bought it, and the sarge lost her leg.”

“Who was your squad sergeant?”

“Staff Sergeant Fallon. She made SFC just after. She’s probably a twenty-chevron sergeant major by now. Do you know her?”

He chuckles in reply. “Everybody knows Master Sergeant Fallon. She’s a freakin’ legend.”

He taps the unit patch on his sleeve with his index finger.

“We’re the advance logistics team for the 309th. The other battalion shipping out with us is the 330th, out of Knoxville. Master Sergeant Fallon is the main ass-kicker in the 330th.”

I don’t have much to do except to stow my kit and exercise, so I spend most of my time on the flight deck, working out while keeping an eye on the shuttles that are delivering personnel and gear every few minutes.

The HD troops start arriving in force in the afternoon. The docking clamps haul up shuttle after shuttle loaded with troopers in battle armor, hauling gear bags. From the other side of the hangar deck, I can’t make out individual faces, and all the HD grunts look alike in their bulky armor suits, but when Sergeant Fallon’s shuttle arrives, I have no trouble making her out in the crowd. Shortly before the late afternoon watch change, the docking arm deposits a weather-beaten fleet shuttle on the deck, the main hatch opens, and a group of HD troopers step out on the flight deck as if they are deploying in the middle of a hostile city. They have their rifles slung across their chests, and there are no magazines in their weapons, but the disembarking HD troopers still radiate a tense readiness.

I recognize Sergeant Fallon instantly. She walks down the ramp with the efficiency of movement I remember well. There’s nothing casual about her stride. She walks onto the Midway’s flight deck like a predator checking out a new environment. I know that her left leg underneath the battle armor is titanium alloy and nanocarbon fibers instead of flesh and bone, but there’s no way to deduce it from her gait. As she steps off the ramp and toward her unit’s assembly area on the other side of the black-and-yellow safety line, there’s a phalanx of her troopers around her—not bodyguards, but limbs of the same belligerent organism, ready to strike out in any direction if needed.

I watch as her group gathers in a circle for a quick briefing and then moves over to their assigned area, where they start to make this unfamiliar territory their own, safety and comfort in numbers.

I haven’t seen Sergeant Fallon since I left the TA four and a half years ago, and we have only exchanged a few dozen MilNet messages since then. Still, the knowledge of her presence on board puts my mind at ease a little. As we prepare to leave Gateway for God knows where, doing God knows what, it’s comforting to know at least one other person on this ship. Having my old squad leader nearby makes me feel a little less alone in the universe right now.