Lines of Departure

^{CHAPTER 19} BLUE ON BLUE

“Well, that didn’t go so great,” Sergeant Fallon says.

We’re in the hardened shelter underneath the massive civilian admin building. In the room with us are the battalion commanders of both mutinous HD battalions, their senior sergeants, and a half dozen civil administration people.

“That’s an understatement,” Lieutenant Colonel Kemp says. He’s the CO of the 330th, and nominally Sergeant Fallon’s superior, but even the brass clearly defer to her at the moment.

“We lost one drop ship and the refueling station,” she concedes. “They lost a drop ship, plus a Shrike and two dozen grunts. They got hurt worse, but they can replace their losses. We’ll miss that Dragonfly when they send the next raid in. Tactically, it was a draw. Strategically, we’re still holding the short end of the stick.”

“That’s an awfully clinical way to write off almost thirty lives,” the administrator says.

“That’s war,” Sergeant Fallon says flatly. When the civilian gives her an appalled glare, she snorts. “Look, what did you think was going to happen once they decided to fight us for your stuff, and we decided to fight back? Did you think they were going to pull up their drop ships, say ‘Well, darn,’ and head back to the carrier?”

The administrator shakes his head. “No, I guess not. But I’m not used to the military way of dealing with casualties. It’s not a mathematical equation.”

Sergeant Fallon takes her rifle off her shoulder and slams it onto the table in front of her. The administrator takes a step back.

“Last riot drop I did back on Earth, I lost twenty-seven of my troopers in fifteen minutes. I damn sure know the names of every single one of my troops who bought it that day. And the pilot of the Dragonfly we just lost? His name was Chief Warrant Officer Beckett Cunningham. Three Silver Stars, five Bronze Stars, three Distinguished Flying Crosses. We’ve been friends for eight years, he saved my life a few dozen times, and now he’s a smoking lump of carbon and jet fuel on your fucking airfield. You don’t have a clue about how I deal with that. So don’t run your mouth about our way of dealing with casualties.”

The administrator glances over to the rest of us and chews on his lower lip. Then he shrugs and turns to Sergeant Fallon again.

“Sorry. I guess it was a little presumptuous. I’m just a little shaken, that’s all. I’m new to this warfare business.”

“They’ll try again,” I say. “They won’t back down now. And without that radar, we won’t see them until they’re close enough for the Dragonflies to pick them up. Not a whole lot of warning for a raid.”

“We have a company at each of the critical sites,” Sergeant Fallon says. “Once the rest of the 309th gets in, we’ll have another three companies in reserve. They have the mobility, though. If they hit us hard enough at each site in turn they can defeat us in detail.”

The flight-ops supervisor, Chief Barnett, clears his throat. “Radar’s a bit chewed up, but that’s a big array, and those were small missiles. I have a bunch of guys working on it right now. We should be back online within an hour or two. Looks like they only took out one of the four transmitters.”

“That’s good news,” I say. “Still leaves us pretty myopic for a few hours, though. They could be dropping out of orbit with most of the regiment right now, and we wouldn’t know it until we saw the drop ships doing a combat descent.”

“What about the fuel pumps?” Sergeant Fallon asks.

“They shredded the refueling probes, and I don’t want to start putting up new ones until we’ve had time to check the tanks underneath,” Chief Barnett says. “There’s other fuel tanks on the airfield, but those don’t have the right probes for your military birds. We could rig up a manual transfer with the handheld pumps for the time being. Take a while to fill up one of those monsters, though.”

“Let’s get something set up, then, before our birds fall out of the sky for lack of fuel.”

One of the civvie radio techs walks into the conference room and looks around, clearly unsure of the military hierarchy. Then he turns to Sergeant Fallon, who looks like she’s in charge wherever she goes.

“There’s an encrypted tight-beam comms request from orbit. They want to talk to Sergeant Fallon.”

“That would be me.” She picks up her rifle and gestures for me to follow her.

“You might as well tag along, sirs,” she says to the two light colonels in the room, and they do.

“Put it on speaker, please,” Sergeant Fallon instructs the comms tech when we walk out of the conference room and into the operations center.

“This is Master Sergeant Fallon, New Svalbard Territorial Army,” she says. “Go ahead.”

“This is Indianapolis Actual, Colonel Campbell,” a familiar voice says. “I also have the skipper of the Gordon in the circuit with us.”

Sergeant Fallon looks at me and raises an eyebrow.

“The Indy is the orbital combat ship,” I tell her. “Little escort tin can. The Gary I. Gordon is the auxiliary freighter.” Then I address Indy Actual directly. “Colonel Campbell, this is Staff Sergeant Andrew Grayson. I was your Neural Networks admin on Versailles.”

There’s a surprised laugh at the other end of the tight-beam connection. “Well, I’ll be damned. How are you doing these days, Mr. Grayson?”

“Doing fine, sir, all things considered. Glad to see they gave you a command after Willoughby.”

“Yeah, they did,” he says. “They gave me an OCS that’s a fifth the size of the Versailles. Some promotion.” He pauses for a moment. “But she’s a fine little ship, with a crack crew.”

“We were expecting to hear from the Midway first, sir,” I say. “Did they bump the Indy to task force flagship, or is this a private call?”

“We have, ah, parted ways with TF 230.7. My XO and the skipper of the Gordon agreed with your sergeant’s interpretation of Commonwealth law. We left the task force two hours ago, and I’ve escorted the Gordon into a different orbit.”

There’s a moment of stunned silence in the room as we all process this new development.

“I guess we’re now the space component of the New Svalbard Territorial Army. But please go ahead and pick an official acronym, because that’s a mouthful to transmit.”

“Understood, sir,” I chuckle.

Across the room, Sergeant Fallon gives the tech the signal to mute the line. Then she looks at me. “Is he for real, or is this a setup?”

“He was my XO when my first ship got shot down by the Lankies,” I say. “He’s a good guy. I don’t know what they’d gain from playing tricks with us at this point. They’re holding all the cards up there.”

“Well, let’s play ours close, just in case.”

“Understood,” I say. Sergeant Fallon nods at the comms tech.

“Be advised that the Midway is dropping a bunch of boats right now,” the colonel continues. “As far as I can see, they’re all drop ships, not attack birds. Can’t tell you for sure, though. They locked my ship out of the task force TacLink when we announced our intentions.”

“Sir, I’m a combat controller, and I have a data suite in my armor. Would you let me get an uplink to Indy’s TacLink? That way, I could get a better picture of the situation.”

“I don’t see why not,” Colonel Campbell replies. “I’ll let the tech do the voodoo. Who’s in charge down there?”

“The ranking officers on the ground are Lieutenant Colonels Kemp and Decker, but Sergeant Fallon’s running ops right now, sir. I guess that makes you the highest-ranking officer in this outfit.”

“Super. I’ll have the supply group make me a uniform with lots of stars.”

Lieutenant Colonel Decker and his sergeant major laugh at this, and even Sergeant Fallon cracks a smile.

“Well, don’t expect any sage advice,” Colonel Campbell continues. “I don’t know shit about ground combat. I’m just a tin can skipper. If Sergeant Fallon and Colonel Decker want to take point on this, they’re welcome to the job. Not that the chain of command is still relevant at this point.”

“The way things are going right now, they’ll need to reserve an entire wing for us at Leavenworth,” Lieutenant Colonel Decker says.

With the help of the Neural Networks tech on the Indianapolis, I reconnect to the ship’s TacLink and look at the sensor feed. The Indy and her charge are in their orbit by themselves, well away from the rest of the task force. I’ve never been on one of the brand-new orbital combat ships, but I’ve heard rumors about their capabilities, and now that I’m tied into the nerve center of one, I see that even the sensationalist rumor mill was short of the mark. She’s less than half the size of a fleet frigate, but her sensors and neural-networks suite are better than anything I’ve ever seen. When I check the sensor data from the networked auxiliary freighter that’s flying formation with her, I see that the Indy’s radar return is only a little bigger than that of a drop ship, even without any stealth measures enabled. Her armor is light, but her eyes and ears are fantastically acute. I do a quick check of her armament and weapons stores. She doesn’t have much in the way of ship-to-ship armament, but her air/space-defense missile system could give headaches to an entire carrier full of Shrikes, and there are four tubes of surface-attack nukes parked amidships, each missile armed with twenty-four MIRVs. For such a small ship, Indy packs quite a wallop against ground targets. Our defecting skipper has command of the smallest warship of the task force, but she’s the most modern by a huge margin—the only hull in TF 230.7 that wasn’t a scrapyard candidate from the reserve fleet.

“Incoming,” Rogue One announces. The Dragonflies are serving as a makeshift radar picket, flying overlapping figure-eight patrols above New Longyearbyen. “Four contacts, bearing three-ten, distance ninety, altitude forty thousand. Looks like a ferry drop, not a combat descent.”

I look at the contact information on my screen and gauge the flight pattern of the incoming formation.

“Indy says they’re Wasps, not Shrikes. We have eyes and ears in orbit now, by the way.”

“Looks like they’re shuttling stuff into Frostbite,” Rogue One says. “Bet you anything they picked that northerly bearing to avoid overflying the town.”

“I’d call that a fair assumption,” I say. “Sarge, we have a drop-ship flight inbound from the north. They’re coming in slow on a regular descent into Frostbite. Could be they’re trying to pull a fast one on us, though.”

“Pass the data to the grunts,” Sergeant Fallon says. “We have Delta Company playing goalkeeper on the northern approach. Tell them to warm up the MANPADs just in case.”

A drop-ship flight of four can ferry an entire battle-ready infantry company minus their heavy weapons. With our deployment pattern, we can meet them at company strength on equal terms anywhere they choose to land in the city, but the thought of two infantry companies duking it out in the middle of a populated civvie town makes me feel more than just a little queasy.

“Copy that,” I say, and pass the data on to Delta Company’s CO and platoon leaders. “Let’s hope they’re not feeling sneaky.”

“Of course, if they’re hauling troops into Frostbite, we’ll have a whole different set of problems soon,” Sergeant Fallon says.

“I don’t think they’re dumb enough to try a land assault with their light armor,” I say, but as I voice the thought, I feel some uncomfortable doubt. An hour and a half ago, I wouldn’t have thought the SI brass would try a vertical assault on the airfield with a single drop ship and a Shrike in attendance.

“Last of the birds will be in the barn in thirty minutes,” Chief Barnett says. “Not a minute too soon, either. We have some bad weather coming in from the north.”

“Bad how?” Sergeant Fallon wants to know.

“New Svalbard bad. You got here just at the tail end of what passes for summer. You have no idea how lucky we were to be able to run flight ops for a week straight. Those puddle jumpers don’t do so well when it gets cold outside, so they stay in the hangars in the winter.”

“This isn’t cold?” Sergeant Fallon eyes the temperature readout on the big status screen at the front of the operations center. It shows “–18C/25knNNE/VIS15Km.”

“That?” the chief chuckles. “That’s what we call T-shirt weather down here. Ever seen a temperature readout of triple-digit negatives? There’s a reason why we build the way we do.”

“Minus one hundred Celsius?” Sergeant Fallon says in disbelief, and Chief Barnett nods.

“And hundred-klick winds on a calm winter day. We basically go underground for three or four months.”

Sergeant Fallon looks over at me and smirks. “Andrew, forget what I said when we got here, about this place being damn near paradise.”

“Yeah, well,” the chief says. “If it was perfect real estate, everyone would want it. We’re just a frozen little moon at the ass end of the Thirty. I doubt even the Lankies would be interested in this place. The Chinese or the Russians sure haven’t bothered us any.”

“Good thing, too,” Colonel Decker says, looking up from the stack of printouts he has been studying for the past fifteen minutes. “’Cause your planetary defense network is a pile of shit. I’ve seen welfare clusters that were better defended than this moon. Whoever designed this defense grid needs to be fired for gross incompetence, or shot for treason. Maybe both.”

“In all fairness, we’re not a settled planet,” Chief Barnett says. “This is just a scientific research station and a water stop. We won’t be ready for full colonization until those atmo processors have done their thing for another ten years.”

“Still,” Colonel Decker says. “No orbital defenses. No nuclear stockpile. Not a scrap of long-range artillery. One airfield big enough to support fleet ops, and that one’s right next to the only settlement on the moon. No combat armor except for a half dozen mules at Frostbite. Absolutely no integrated air defenses. A pack of Cub Scouts with pocketknives could take this moon.”

“I don’t know, Colonel,” Sergeant Fallon says. “All things considered, I’m kind of glad the space monkeys over at Frostbite don’t have any tanks or artillery at their disposal right now.”

“That’s one way to look at it. Glad you haven’t lost your ability to see the silver lining, Sergeant.”

“Yes, I have,” she says. “Back on Earth. Right around the time I had to shoot my first welfare rat out rioting for something to eat other than recycled shit.”

“You know we’re fucked one way or the other, right?” Sergeant Fallon says to me a little while later when we step outside for some fresh air. The temperature has dropped so much in the last few hours that I’m very grateful for the heating elements in my battle armor.

“Yeah,” I say. “Fleet wins, we end up in the brig, and then it’s off to military prison for the next twenty years. We win, we get to hang on to this frozen wasteland only until they turn the network back on, and more fleet shows up. Network stays down, we have to worry about the Lankies finding us. No happy endings either way.”

“So why’d you switch sides? You know I wouldn’t have kept you from going back to Frostbite with those drop-ship jocks, right?”

“I know that.” I peel my unit patch off the pauldron of my battle armor and look at it. “Bunch of reasons, really.”

“Like what?”

“Because I didn’t like the stuff we had to do back in the TA. All those riot drops we did. I mean, they were shooting at us in those welfare clusters, but only because we dropped into their living rooms ready to kick their asses, you know? I don’t hold a grudge. Not even over the two rounds I took in Detroit.”

Sergeant Fallon looks at me with an unreadable expression.

“And then I get the fleet billet,” I continue. “The whole shit with the Lankies started, and I actually felt good about what I was doing. Saving humanity, and all that shit. Hell, even fighting the Russians and the Chinese. At least they were legit enemies. And they were just as well armed as we were. I don’t hold grudges there, either. But it’s like you told the fleet over comms. I’ll be damned if I go back to that ghetto police shit. We turn against our own, we have no fucking reason for existing.”

Sergeant Fallon smiles, something she does so rarely that she looks like a completely different person for a moment.

“We’re supposed to be hard-asses, Andrew. That’s why we get the guns, and the special chow, and the bank accounts at the end. So we stay on the leash and bite everyone they point us at.”

“Point me at a Lanky colony, and I’ll let you shoot me right into it with a bio-pod from orbit, and call in a nuclear strike on my own position. But if they want me to play prison guard again, they need to find someone else.”

“That’s what we were supposed to do,” she says. “That’s why we came along for the trip. Get us off Earth, make us keep the civvies in line like we do back home. You guys were supposed to hold our leashes.”

“Not working out all that well so far, is it?”

“No, it isn’t.” She kicks a few pebbles with the toe of her boot. “Truth be told, I wouldn’t mind being a fly on the wall back at Defense on Earth right now. If they can’t count on their crack outfits to keep some HD reprobates under control out here away from the press, I doubt they’re having better luck back home. Maybe there won’t even be a North American Commonwealth by the time we get home. If we ever get home, that is.”

“Could be worse,” I say. “Could be they turn the network back on, and when we arrive back at Earth, there’s a few hundred Lanky seed ships in orbit, and the atmosphere’s twenty percent carbon dioxide.”

Sergeant Fallon shrugs. “Then I’ll fight the urge to eat my own rifle, and join whatever part of humanity wants to go look for a new place to live. Humans are hardy, Andrew. They’ll do whatever they can to keep on living, no matter how shitty life gets. Just ask the poor bastards in the welfare clusters back home.”

“And I thought I caught a huge break when they sent me the acceptance letter,” I say. “One out of a hundred applicants, and all that.”

“Well, you’re here, aren’t you? Could be worse. At least you have a rifle and some skills. Enough anyway to be able to tell our esteemed leadership you’re not playing anymore.”

The chirp of a priority comms signal interrupts our conversation.

“Tailpipe One, Indianapolis.”

“Go ahead, Indy,” I say.

“Be advised that Midway is launching Shrikes, without any drop ships to escort. Looks like half their wing. We can’t verify their exact loadouts, but it looks like they’re carrying external ordnance.”

“Copy that, Indy. Feed me the CIC plot, please.”

The tactical display shows the sensor feed from the Indianapolis’s ridiculously advanced main array. The Shrikes are pairing up and entering the atmosphere in short intervals, at a speed that suggests heavy loadouts.

“Got ’em. I don’t think that’s just a ferry flight, and they’re sure not escorting shit. I’d bet some non-soy steak that we’re looking at a strike package.”

“I wouldn’t take that bet, Tailpipe. You guys keep your heads low down there. We’ll track and update as far as our radar can follow.”

“Copy that, Indy. Tailpipe One out.”

I switch my comms suite to our local guard channel.

“All units, raid warning. Raid Two is three pairs of Shrikes entering atmo above the northern hemisphere. Warm up MANPAD seekers and stand by for threat vectors. Sound the civvie air-raid alert. Repeat: raid warning, raid warning.”

All around us, the air-raid sirens of the civilian warning system start sounding their harsh warble.

“Air raid, air raid. This is not a drill. All personnel, seek shelter.”

Next to me, Sergeant Fallon checks her rifle with the casual thoroughness of someone who has performed the action a million times before.

“Well, it was nice being all introspective, Andrew. Now let’s get back to shooting people.”