Lines of Departure

^{CHAPTER 15} REVELATIONS

Task Force 230.7 is barely deserving of its name. The small group of mostly tired old hulls that transitions through the chute with us could probably defeat a single new destroyer, but I wouldn’t want to be part of the crew that tried it. There’s the eighty-year-old Midway, escorted by a light cruiser that’s almost as old, a frigate from another near-obsolete class, and a cargo ship from the auxiliary fleet. We have exactly one hull in our task force that’s younger than I am. However, that hull is the Indianapolis, and she’s just a lightly armed orbital-patrol craft barely big enough for a fusion plant and an Alcubierre drive. The only bright spot in the order of battle is the Portsmouth, one of the fleet’s fast and well-armed resupply ships.

Our misfit assembly of ill-matched ships pops out of Alcubierre after seven hours of transition. I’ve ridden the interstellar pathways of the fleet’s Alcubierre network hundreds of times, and while you can’t ever deduce your destination before the transition—the fleet ships vary their speeds and never go a direct course to the outbound chutes—you can tell the distance traveled by the time spent in transition, because ships can’t dogleg or vary their speed in the bubble. Seven hours puts us close to the Thirty, and I pull out my PDP to check the star charts for possible candidates at that distance, but the CIC saves me the work with an all-ship announcement.

“All hands, stand down from transition stations. Welcome to Fomalhaut.”

Fomalhaut, I think. A huge system that’s mostly hostile to human life. If they wanted to ship us off to an interstellar gulag, they picked just about the perfect spot.

Four hours after our transition into the Fomalhaut system, Captain Michaelson summons the SpecOps company for a briefing. When I walk into the makeshift ready room, there are maybe four squads’ worth of troopers sitting on the hastily arranged folding chairs. Captain Michaelson is at the front of the room, leaning on the briefing lectern.

“This is not a mission briefing,” he says when everyone has settled in. “It’s just a status update from upstairs. Don’t worry about taking notes.”

I do a quick headcount and beret-color survey in the room. There are thirty SI troopers, most with recon patches on their sleeves. Three fleet guys are sitting in a group in the front row, and on the other side of the room, there’s another trooper with the red beret of the combat controller fraternity. Captain Michaelson surveys the assembly and shakes his head, clearly irritated.

“I’m supposed to have a reinforced company sitting in front of me right now. Instead, I get one understrength recon platoon, three Spaceborne Rescue guys, and two combat controllers. I seem to be short my SEAL team and an entire recon platoon.”

“What a shock,” one of the recon guys in my row murmurs.

“But whatever,” the captain continues. “I guess I should be glad I’m not standing here by myself and briefing the wall over there, the way things have been going.”

He turns on the briefing screen on the wall behind him.

“Let’s make this one quick and easy. Anyone in this room who hasn’t been to lovely Fomalhaut yet?”

A few of the SI troopers raise their hands, rather sheepishly.

“Good. The rest of you are repeat customers, then.”

He brings up a strategic chart of the system, a bright Type-A star with a massive debris disk around it, and three planets orbiting somewhat forlornly in the space between.

“Let me do the quick tour for you new people,” Captain Michaelson says. “Fomalhaut is the low-rent district of the galaxy, as far as cosmic neighborhoods go. It’s big and cold and empty, and there aren’t a whole lot of decent places to pitch a tent out here.”

He picks one of the orbiting planets and zooms in on it.

“None of the planets here are terraformable. Fomalhaut is too close to the parent star, and gets cooked with radiation. Fomalhaut b is a Jovian gas giant. Fomalhaut d is a frozen ball of gas way beyond the debris disk. The only real estate we could get livable in this system are two moons—one around Fomalhaut b, and one around Fomalhaut c. One belongs to us, and the other to the SRA. Guess who got the more hospitable patch of ground in this system.”

As he talks, he isolates the planet’s moon on the display and zooms the perspective until the dirty-looking little sphere takes up most of the screen.

“That would be New Svalbard. It’s our watering hole here in Fomalhaut, but it ain’t much else. Hope you all packed your warm undies, because we’re going to beef up the garrison down there for a while.”

There’s an upswell of unhappy murmuring in the room. One of the Spaceborne Rescue sergeants raises his hand.

“Sir, where are we going to stick two battalions and a whole regiment down there? Camp Frostbite doesn’t hold much more than two or three companies.”

“We’re not,” Captain Michaelson replies. “We’re splitting up our HD friends among all the terraforming bases. One platoon per station. Their HQ platoon stays with our guys at Frostbite. The SI regiment goes on rotation—one company dirtside, the other three up here on the Midway with the drop ships, as a mobile reaction force. I’m keeping the recon platoon and all three of you Spaceborne Rescue guys, too. The combat controllers will be embedded with HD, one of you per battalion. You’ll be the fleet liaison, give the big guns something to shoot at if the shit hits the fan. Keep an eye on our HD friends while you’re down there, too.”

As the captain goes into details, I consider this new development, and can’t help but feel a bit of grudging respect for the genius at Fleet Command who decided where to put those two shaky battalions without having to tie up three thousand bunks in military prison. It’s too bad the only truly clever people upstairs use their smarts to screw over their own instead of coming up with better ways to kill Lankies.

According to my commanding officer, part of the reason for embedding me with the HD troops is to keep a dependable set of fleet eyes in their ranks, so I feel more than a little seditious when I seek out Sergeant Fallon right after our briefing to fill her in on the fleet’s plans for her battalion.

“That’s pretty devious,” she says when I have sketched the big picture for her. “Splitting us into platoon-sized chunks, so we can’t get too many rifles to bear all at once. Without our drop ships, we’re stuck wherever they’re putting us.”

“And they can come down on uppity units with most of a regiment from orbit, since they have all the airmobile gear.”

“But what’s to keep our grunts from just wandering off and meeting up to re-form companies anyway?”

I shake my head. “This is New Svalbard, Sarge. Ever done any cold-weather training back on Earth?”

“Yeah,” she says. “Tierra del Fuego and Antarctica.”

“Well, picture Antarctica in the really shitty time of the year. Outside of the tundra belt around the equator, that would be called a heat wave on New Svalbard. Most of the moon is a sheet of ice, ten kilometers thick at the poles. We have one big town down there, and sixty-four terraformers. They’re all along the equator, like a girdle. We got this strip of tundra worked out, but you’re still talking three-hundred-kilometer winds in the cold season. Even the heaters in your armor won’t keep you alive long enough to walk from one atmo exchanger to the next. You want to stay real close to that fusion plant at the terraformer.”

“Well, isn’t that special,” Sergeant Fallon says, and exchanges glances with the other HD troopers sitting around the table. “That’s one hell of a good way to keep us all holed up and in a predictable spot.”

“We’ll figure something out,” one of the troopers says with conviction. All around the table, HD grunts nod in agreement.

“Of course we will,” Sergeant Fallon says. “That’s what we do. Improvise, adapt, overcome. I’ll be damned if I let myself get outfoxed by some fleet pukes.”

She gives me a curt nod, and raps the surface of the makeshift table with the knuckles of both fists.

“Thanks for keeping us in the loop, Andrew. I owe you one.”

“Not at all, Sarge,” I say. “Just starting to pay back everything I owe you. Plus five years of interest.”

I head up to Captain Michaelson’s office nook. He’s looking at a tactical map of New Svalbard when I knock on the frame of the open hatch, and he waves me in without turning off his screen.

“You been down there before, Grayson?”

“Yes, sir. Bunch of times, for water stops. Never had to set foot outside Camp Frostbite, though.”

“I haven’t been down there in three years, since I was a second lieutenant,” he says. “I’m sure it hasn’t turned into a tropical paradise since then.”

“Have you decided where to embed me, sir?”

“No, I haven’t. Why, you got a preference?”

“I know someone in the 330th, sir.”

He looks at me with an unreadable expression for a moment, and I’m just about convinced he’ll assign me to the 309th instead, when he shrugs and returns his attention to the screen of his data terminal.

“Sure, go with the 330th. Might as well make our stay as pleasant as we can. Go check in with their CO, and get your stuff ready for the ferry drop. We’ll be in orbit in six hours, give or take.”

It feels strange to board a drop ship at a stroll, without the haste and urgency of an impending combat drop. When the call to board craft comes, I line up on the flight deck with the headquarters platoon of the 330th, and trudge aboard the assigned Wasp. We’re all in combat armor, and everyone is loaded down with weapons and personal gear units, all our issued kit in a tough, wheeled polyplast container with a DNA lock.

I claim a seat and buckle in. As I fumble with the lock on the old-style seat harness, someone else drops into the seat next to mine with a grunt. I look over and see Sergeant Fallon’s face.

“Ready for a dirtside vacation, Andrew?”

“Hey, Sarge. I didn’t know you were in the HQ platoon.”

“I’m not.” She winks at me. “Actually, I’m the NCOIC for Delta Company. Don’t tell anyone, though.”

She puts her rifle into the storage bracket next to her seat, and engages the lock.

“We did a little rearranging, you see. The staff platoon is going to Camp Frostbite, not the terraforming stations. We stacked the deck a little bit, to make sure all the aces end up in the right spot. You never know what’s going to happen, right?”

“That’s the damn truth,” I say.

Camp Frostbite is a cluster of ferroconcrete domes hugging a hillside. It’s next to the main terraforming hub on New Svalbard, right in the center of the habitable tundra belt carved out along the equator by a few decades of relentless terraforming. Of course, “habitable” on New Svalbard only means “not instantly fatal to exposed personnel.” When the ramp of our drop ship lowers onto the flight pad of Camp Frostbite’s airfield, a polar gale sweeps through the cargo hold instantly, a chilly welcome to one of the most inhospitable places humanity has ever settled. To a man and woman, all the troopers in the hold lower the visors on their helmets.

There’s no welcoming committee on the windswept landing pad. I step out onto the concrete, which to my surprise is not covered in snow like on my previous visits to New Svalbard. Behind me, Sergeant Fallon stops at the bottom of the ramp, and then takes a slow and deliberate step onto the tarmac. She scrapes the surface of the concrete with the toe of her boot a few times and walks over to where I’m standing.

“First steps on a different world,” she says to me over private suit-to-suit comms. “Doesn’t really feel any different from Earth. I’m a little underwhelmed.”

“We pick them for easy access to minerals or water,” I say. “Pretty isn’t very high up on the list. Most of the colonies are pretty rough.”

“Well, at least the air’s clean. Great view, too.”

Sergeant Fallon turns in a circle to take in the scenery all around the base. The town in the valley below is the only evidence of a human presence in sight. Behind us, there’s a chain of snow-covered mountains rising into the steel-gray sky, and beyond the town there’s a vast expanse of tundra and glaciers, devoid of any trace of life.

“Hardly any people,” Sergeant Fallon says. “Beats a metroplex all to hell, it does. Crank up the thermostat a couple dozen degrees, and it’d be damn near paradise.”

Camp Frostbite has expanded since I was last down here for a water stop. Before, there were enough buildings to house a reinforced company and a platoon or two of vehicles. Now the number of structures has more than doubled. There are four company buildings, a new mess hall and rec facility, and a much bigger vehicle hangar. As we walk through the flight facility on our way to the company quarters, I notice that the local garrison now has its own flight of drop ships. Four brand-new Dragonflies are neatly parked inside the heated and spotless aircraft hangar. What used to be a grungy little outpost with the barest set of amenities has grown into a proper military base.

“We’re in Building Two, along with the 309th’s staff platoon. Enlisted on the second and third floors, noncoms on the fourth floor,” the platoon sergeant says when we file into the central courtyard with all our gear. “The fleet guys are already here, so don’t be stepping on any toes. They’re over in Building Three.”

The new company buildings are squat, loaf-shaped structures with rounded corners and thick walls, looking more like bunkers than living quarters. The four of them are all lined up in a row on one side of the main road that bisects Camp Frostbite. With the garrison company in Building One, and a company of the Midway’s SI regiment in Building Three, the two staff platoons of the Homeworld Defense battalions are neatly corralled between superior numbers of Spaceborne Infantry troops.

We drag our gear up to Building Two, find some rooms, and stash our stuff in the new berth lockers we find. Once again, I get to claim a room of my own, continuing a chain of luck unbroken since I got back into the fleet after Combat Controller School. I transfer my gear and battle armor into the locker, take out my PDP, and check for local network access. Whoever did the upgrades to Camp Frostbite didn’t forget the data infrastructure, because I’m on the local MilNet node instantly, without the transmission lag typical to most backwater colonies.

I check my message inbox for incoming traffic, hoping against my better knowledge that Halley managed to dash out a reply before the Midway did her last pre-transition database synchronization. All the new messages I’ve received are just administrative garbage from the fleet, of course. If I left the solar system for the last time when we transitioned out, then the common history I share with Halley will have no final period, no formal epilogue.

I don’t want to dwell on things that are outside of my control, so I stow my PDP and leave the room to do the sensible and soldierly thing—I head for the chow hall to check the quality of the local food.

The day on New Svalbard is over a hundred hours long, but most of us have lived in windowless tubes on six-hour watch cycles for so long that we don’t need a daylight transition to be able to sleep. I spend the next two watch cycles sleeping, eating, and getting settled in my new environment. It’s the middle of summer on New Svalbard right now, which means that we can walk around outside in our regular fatigues without turning into expressionist ice sculptures within a few minutes. The road from the main gate of the base down to the town has been upgraded from dirt to a high-traction hardpack mix, and the town itself has grown so much closer to the base that walking down to the base seems feasible now.

“You can walk it,” the gate guard says, guessing my thoughts as I stand and survey the tundra. “It’s a kilometer and a half. We do it all the time when the weather’s good. Just don’t try it when we have winter gales blowing, ’less you’re in heated armor.”

“Anything down there worth the hike?”

“They got some bars in town. The new rec building here on base is nicer than anything the civvies have, but sometimes you want to see people who aren’t wearing uniforms, you know?”

“Yeah,” I say. The gate guard nods and returns to his duties, scanning the screens in the gate booth for sensor alarms.

I walk past the gate and down the hardpack surface of the road for a little while, until I’m out of earshot of the gate booth. There’s a breeze coming from the north, where snowcapped mountains form a ragged wall on the horizon. It’s cold enough that I wouldn’t want to spend an hour out here in just my battle dress, but for the moment, I don’t mind the cold. Most of the time, I breathe the scrubbed air on spaceships, and whenever I drop onto the surface of a colony planet, I’m usually too busy with staying alive and killing things to stop and appreciate the clean planetary atmosphere. New Svalbard is harsh, cold, and barren, but there’s a clean purity about it that is breathtaking to someone who grew up in a Public Residence Cluster, where a single tenement building has more people in it than the entire population of the little town in the valley below the base. I wish I could record some vid footage for Mom. In all my years on Earth, I’ve never been anywhere you can see for twenty miles in any direction and not spot another human being.

Ten more years of terraforming, and this place will be pretty, I think. And then the SRA will try to take it from us, once we’ve done all the hard work for them, and we’ll turn this little moon into a battlefield. If the Lankies don’t come in and grab it for themselves long before then.

Overhead, two drop ships come swooping out of the overcast sky. They keep their tight formation as they make a pass over Camp Frostbite, navigation lights blinking. Their wing pylons are crammed with cargo pods. The Midway’s drop-ship wing has been shuttling people and gear from ship to surface for the last two watch cycles, a steady flow of traffic between the carrier and the outposts. In less than twelve hours, the number of Commonwealth troops on the ground has increased tenfold. The two HD battalions spread out among the terraforming stations don’t have any organic air support or heavy armor, but even so, the SRA would find this place a tough nut to crack for anything less than a brigade. To the Lankies, our presence wouldn’t matter—just a few more anthills to kick over.

I want to walk around on the cold tundra some more, enjoy this rare solitude and the wide-open spaces around Camp Frostbite, but then the speakers of the base announcement system come to life and disturb the tranquility of the scene.

“All off-duty personnel, report to mess hall at 1600 hours for a briefing. Repeat, all off-duty personnel report to the mess hall at 1600.”

I check my watch to find that I have fifteen minutes left, so I make my way back to the gate reluctantly.

The new mess hall on the base is barely big enough to hold all the troops now present on base. When I walk in, almost all the tables are occupied. Sergeant Fallon and her HD entourage are seated near the back of the room by one of the exit hatches, and she waves me over. I make my way through the crowd and sit down with the HD grunts.

“Wonder what they have to say to us that requires every pair of boots in the same room,” Sergeant Fallon says.

“Beats me,” I say. “This is a first.”

The brass don’t make us wait too long. We hop to attention when the garrison company’s CO and the battalion commanders walk into the room. Both the HD officers are lieutenant colonels and outrank the SI officer who is merely a major, but the SI major is clearly in charge.

“Listen up, people,” he says. “The task force commander wants to address all units.”

“Attention, all hands,” a voice comes out of the address system. “This is General Pearce, Commanding Officer, Task Force 230.7.

“I’ll cut right to the chase, gentlemen. We have arrived in the Fomalhaut system, and here we will stay. We are reinforcing the garrison here on New Svalbard. The reason for all those extra supplies is this: Our stay here is open-ended.

“The good news, if you can call it that, is that fleet Intel finally figured out how the Lankies move around, and how they find our colonies. The bad news is that the ugly bastards use our own Alcubierre networks against us.”

At this revelation, not even military discipline and briefing protocol can stop the assembled troops from voicing their surprise. All at once, a few hundred conversations break out in the room. I look at the SI major, and notice with some satisfaction that he seems just as surprised as we are. Fleet Command played their cards closely on this one, and even though I had guessed that the grunts were going to get the short end of the stick again, the magnitude of the news leaves me momentarily gut-punched.

“We don’t know how they pull it off exactly, but we do know that the Lankies use our transition nodes—ours and the SRA’s—to pinpoint our colonies. We’ve basically set up a bunch of blinking road signs for them. Therefore, Fleet has decided to shut the whole network down until we figure out how to counter those seed ships. Our transition to Fomalhaut was the last one before Fleet turned off the transit node on the solar system side. The beacons are deactivated, and the transition points are being mined with nukes right now.”

“Shut it!” the major at the front of the room shouts when the swelling din of exclamations from the assembled garrison threatens to overwhelm the audio from the overhead address system, where the general is undoubtedly on a one-way feed. The noise level in the room decreases, but not by much.

“…can’t tell you how long this task force will be on station in this system. I can tell you, however, that we will fly the flag of the Commonwealth on New Svalbard for however long it takes—a month, a year, or more. We will defend this moon against any threat, whether Russian, Chinese, or Lanky, until Command reopens the Alcubierre network and relieves us.

“Until that happens, nothing will change. Promotion schedules are still in effect. Anyone whose term of enlistment expires during our stay will be able to reenlist for another regular term, or have their original term extended until we get back to Earth. Those of you who choose to serve another full enlistment will be eligible for an additional discharge bonus.”

Some of the troopers at the table let out suppressed laughs at this. The HD soldiers are mostly either shell-shocked or talking amongst themselves. The commotion in the room is at an entirely unacceptable level for an address by a general officer, but the brass at the front of the room don’t make much of an effort to suppress the noise.

“I expect every one of you to keep doing your duty until we are relieved and called home. The ships of the task force will set up a picket and assume orbital-patrol duties.

“We’re in a good position, tactically speaking. We have enough ordnance to hold off a superior force, and enough supplies to stay on independent duty out here for many months. We have two battalions plus on the ground, with combat teams of at least platoon strength at every terraforming station. We have an embarked regiment on the Midway that can drop onto any trouble spot on the moon within an hour. We have all the gear and troops we need to give a bloody nose to half a brigade of SRA marines. And if the Lankies find this rock before the fleet calls us back, we’ll throw everything we have at them the second the first of them puts a toe on this moon.”

Every Spaceborne Infantry grunt in the room knows that if the Lankies want the place, they’ll take it, regardless of the number of rifles we point at them. The general’s little pep talk is probably designed to make the HD contingent less anxious about getting dumped on a backwoods moon to mount a hopeless defense, but I can see on the faces all around me that the bullshit detectors of the Homeworld Defense troopers are just as finely calibrated as ours.

“Say, Staff Sergeant Grayson,” Master Sergeant Fallon addresses me, loud enough for the rest of the table to hear. “How many colony planets and moons have the Lankies contested so far?”

“Forty-four at last count, Master Sergeant Fallon,” I reply in the same volume.

“And how many did we successfully defend, Sergeant Grayson?”

“Zero at last count, Master Sergeant Fallon.”

There are nervous chuckles all around us. At the head of the room, the SI major launches another appeal to keep the noise level down. Overhead, the general continues his little speech over the one-way circuit, unaware of the sudden unrest among the ranks.

“We will dig in, and we will hold the line until we are relieved. The Lankies have never shown any interest in the Fomalhaut system, and the Sino-Russians have other problems, so I predict we will have a nice, quiet stay on New Svalbard.”

Sergeant Fallon leans back in her chair and folds her arms across her chest. Unlike most of her HD troopers, she doesn’t look shocked or dismayed. Instead, there’s a knowing sort of smile on her face, as if she just heard the punch line to a good, but familiar joke.

“Now, see,” she says in my direction, “I wouldn’t bet any money on that.”