Lines of Departure

^{CHAPTER 1} REENLISTING

“I solemnly swear and affirm to loyally serve the North American Commonwealth, and to bravely defend its laws and the freedom of its citizens.”

I signed my reenlistment form yesterday in the captain’s office, so my butt is already public property for the next five years, but the military likes ritual. We’re in one of the briefing rooms, and the captain and XO are standing on either side of the briefing lectern. Someone dragged out a wrinkled North American Commonwealth flag and draped it over the wall display, and I have my hand in the air as I repeat the oath of service for the second time in my military career. A corporal from the fleet news service is recording the event for whatever reason. Even with our recent troubles, the military still has a 90 percent retention rate after the first term of enlistment, so a re-up ceremony isn’t exactly an uncommon event.

“Congratulations, Staff Sergeant Grayson,” the captain says after I complete the oath. “You’re back in the fold for another five years.”

What else was I going to do, anyway? I think.

“Thank you, sir,” I say, and take the entirely ceremonial reenlistment certificate from his outstretched hand. This means a bonus in my account, which has been growing steadily since my first day of Basic five years ago, but Commonwealth currency is becoming increasingly worthless. By the time I get out, the money in my government account will probably just be enough to pay for a breakfast and a train ride home to the welfare section of Boston.

I didn’t reenlist for the money, of course. I reenlisted because I didn’t know what the hell else to do. All my professional skills revolve around blowing things up or working classified neural-network systems, which makes me pretty much useless in the civilian world. I don’t much feel like going back to Earth and claiming a welfare apartment until I die early. I haven’t been back to Terra since the day I left Navy Indoc at Great Lakes for Fleet School on Luna, but from what I hear over the MilNet, the old homeworld isn’t doing so well. Some guys who have been there on leave recently say that the worst thing we could do to the Lankies would be to let them take the place.

Earth’s population crested at thirty billion people two years ago, and three billion of them are crammed into North America. Terra is an ant hive, teeming with hungry, discontented, and antisocial ants, and I have no desire to add to the population headcount. At least the military still feeds its people, which is more than can be said for the NAC’s civil administration. Mom makes it down to the civil building for net access once a month or so, and in her last message she mentioned that the Basic Nutritional Allowance has been cut to thirteen thousand calories per person per week. It looks like they’re running out of shit and soy down there.

I didn’t need to think very long about reenlisting, that’s for sure. Of course, my girlfriend Halley also reenlisted, so I really didn’t have much of a choice.

“So it’s done,” Halley says. The video feed is a bit grainy, but I have no problem seeing the dark rings under her eyes. She’s had a long day at Combat Flight School, teaching new pilots how to dodge Chinese portable surface-to-air missiles and Lanky bio-mines. We’re in the same system for a change—my ship is part of a task force that is practicing stealth insertions on one of Saturn’s many moons, and we can both tap into the orbital relay above Mars, which has enough spare bandwidth for a few minutes of vid chat.

“Yeah, it’s done. Had no choice, since you went ahead and just re-upped before me.”

“I thought we had decided we’d both sign again,” she says. “Remember? You crunched the numbers and said that both our bonuses were spare change at this point.”

“Yeah, I know. Just ribbin’ you. Having fun at Flight School?”

“Don’t get me started,” she says, rolling her eyes. “I can’t fucking wait to get back into the fleet. I mean, it’s nice not to be shot at for a few months, but I’d swear an oath that some of these rookies work for the other team. I’ve almost gotten killed three times this week alone.”

“Hey, you’re grooming the next batch of hero pilots. That’s important work.”

“Grooming the next batch of coffin liners,” she says darkly. “Our SRA friends have some new portable surface-to-air missile. Nuclear warhead in the fifty-microton range. Just enough to blot out a flight of drop ships without making a mess on the ground.”

“Shit,” I say. “Say what you want about the Lankies, but at least they don’t fuck around with nukes just yet.”

“They don’t need nukes, Andrew. They’re kicking our asses well enough without.”

Other than the ever-present risk of sudden and violent death, Halley has been the only constant in my life since we met in Basic Training Platoon 1066 back at NACRD Orem. We’ve managed to keep a sort of long-distance relationship going, months apart interspersed with short leaves spent together in run-down navy rec facilities, or on backwater colonies. We’ve both moved up in our respective career fields—she’s a first lieutenant in command of a brand-new top-of-the-line attack drop ship, and I’m in my second year as a combat controller after volunteering for what Halley called “the nutcase track.”

The job of a combat controller is to jump into the thick of the action with the frontline grunts on critical missions, but carrying a bunch of radios and a target designator instead of cutting-edge weaponry. It was a logical progression when I wanted to move up from Neural Networks, since I was already trained on all the fleet information systems. They were looking for volunteers, and I was looking for a more exciting job than watching progress bars in a Neural Networks control room. They got their volunteer, and I got excitement in spades.

I passed selection for the combat controller track, and spent almost the entire third year of my service term in training. In the meantime, Halley racked up two hundred combat missions, thousands of flight hours, and a Distinguished Flying Cross for some seriously insane flying while snatching a recon team from the embrace of a company of SRA marines in the middle of a hot-and-heavy firefight. We both think the other has the more dangerous job, and we’re both right, depending on the mission of the week.

“Going planetside again in a few days,” I tell Halley. Even through the secure comms link, I’m not supposed to give out operational details. The filtering software runs the connection on a three-second delay beyond the normal lag, to chop the feed if it detects that I’m talking about planets, ship names, or star systems.

“Lankies or SRA?” she asks.

“Lankies. I’m dropping in with a recon team. We’re going to look for something worth dropping a few kilotons on.”

“Just a team? That’s not a lot of guns.”

“Well, the idea is to avoid them if we can. Besides, I’m going in with Recon. I’ll be fine.”

“Yeah, well, even recon guys die,” Halley says. “I’ve showed up at more than one scheduled pickup without anyone there because the whole team got greased.”

“If we run into trouble, I’ll let Recon do the shooting while I run the other way. I’m just a walking radio farm.”

“For being complete shit magnets, we’re actually pretty lucky, you know?” Halley muses, and we both laugh.

“You have a weird definition of ‘lucky,’” I say, but I know she’s right. We’re doing some of the most dangerous work in the Fleet Arm, and we’ve managed to survive almost four years of combat deployments without any serious scrapes. We only had twelve graduates in our platoon at the end of Basic Training, and four of them have died in combat. Strangely enough, all the members of our chow-hall table are still alive, and I’m the only member of our little group who managed to get hurt enough for a Purple Heart. Halley’s Distinguished Flying Cross makes her the most highly decorated of us, and since she was the only graduate of our platoon to snatch an officer-track slot, she’s also the highest-ranking member of Chow Hall Table 5.

“Well, we’ve made it this far,” Halley says, as if she just had the same thoughts. “What’s another five years of dodging ground fire?”

“Hey, it could be worse,” I reply. “We could be back on Earth right now.”

My current ship is the NACS Intrepid, fleet carrier and one of three ships of the new Essex class. The Essex carriers are fast, well armed, and the last new hardware in the fleet for the foreseeable future. The ships were ordered before the war with the Lankies broke out, and they hurriedly specified some refits to accommodate the new tactical situation before the three ships of the class were even out of the construction dock. The navy had ordered seven more, ten ships in total to form the new backbone of the NAC carrier force, but then they ran out of money, so the three Essex carriers form a rather short backbone. They’re not nearly as big as the Navigator-class supercarriers that preceded them, but they’re faster and fitted with a better sensor suite, which has proven a bigger asset against the Lankies than sheer size or armor-belt thickness. The Essex carriers are always in demand, and always in the thick of things.

I like serving on a carrier, because the big bird farms have a lot more space than the little tin cans I usually pulled when I was still a Neural Networks administrator. As one of three combat controllers on the Intrepid, I get my own single-person berth, a luxury usually reserved for senior NCOs and staff officers. That means I get to vid-chat in private, without a bunch of my peers half-listening over my shoulder. Combat controllers are always in demand as well, since there are so few of us, and we get certain privileges above our rank and pay grade. The entire fleet only has two hundred of us, so we never have much idle time.

Since graduating from the pipeline and putting on the scarlet beret, I’ve been hopping from one star system to the next, fighting the SRA one month and the Lankies the next. If the fleet paid a cent for every million miles traveled, I’d be the richest individual in the history of the planet. Because Fleet Arm ships need downtime for refits and rearming, I tend to hop ships every six months or so, because we combat controllers are too few to go around to have as much downtime as the hardware. Before the Intrepid, I was on the Atlas, the Tecumseh, the New Hampshire, and a half dozen other ships whose names I can’t even recall without consulting my personnel and transfer record.

In the end, it’s all the same business, anyway—launching from a carrier or cruiser with a stern-faced and tight-lipped unit of Commonwealth grunts, going into battle against Russians or Chinese or Lankies, and calling down the wrath of the gods on our enemies when needed. The grunts have rifles, rocket launchers, and tactical nuclear mortars. I have something much more fearsome than that—a set of radios that can talk to the attack ships of the task force in orbit, and a computer that can just about remote-control that task force.

When the grunts bump into a minor problem, they use their rifles and rockets. For bigger problems, they lob half-kiloton nukes. For really big problems, they call on me, and I direct in a wing of Shrikes loaded with ordnance, or an orbital fifty-megaton strike that will turn an entire Lanky settlement into a few hundred square miles of abstract art rendered in glowing slag. One of my fellow combat controllers has the words Planetary Remodeling Kit written on the lid of his tactical control deck, and that joke is not too much of an exaggeration.

In between the hours and days of excitement, stress, and outright terror, however, there are days and weeks of boredom, thanks to the mechanics of interstellar travel. My next mission, a little less than eight days away, will be on a planet called New Wales, in orbit around the fourth planet of the Theta Persei system. The trip to the solar-system end of the Alcubierre chute to Theta Persei will take seven days, and the transition across the intervening thirty-seven light years only twelve hours.

Once we get there, we will do battle with the Lankies. I don’t know yet what’s waiting for us on New Wales, but a few factors have been a reliable constant for the last few years. We will be outgunned, outnumbered, and always just on the brink of utter defeat as we try to hold the line, try to keep our ever-contracting little bubble of colonized space from shrinking any further.

We’re the corps. This is what we do. The Commonwealth—humanity—is in deep shit, and we’re the people with the shovels. The trouble is that it’s a huge pile of shit, and they’re very small shovels.