Lines of Departure

^{CHAPTER 2} NEW WALES

You can always tell the efficient officers by the way they hold their briefings. The Fleet Arm’s cap-ship guys and console jockeys tend to blather on and go through the briefing protocol by the book, and everyone in the briefing room usually zones out after being told the same information six different ways. The recon officers cut right down to the chase, and by the time their briefings are finished, the mid-rat sandwiches in the briefing room aren’t even halfway gone yet.

“Today’s mission will be a drop-and-shop run,” Major Gomez says once we’re all in our seats. As the sole combat controller assigned to this mission, I am the only Fleet Arm guy in the room. The rest of the troops are Spaceborne Infantry Force Recon, a team I’ve dropped with a few times before.

“New Wales has been Lanky real estate for right around a year now,” the major continues. “Chances are good you’ll find some major settlement clusters down there. They’ve had plenty of time to dig in and make themselves at home.”

Behind the major, the wall-mounted holographic briefing screen cycles through a series of three-dimensional renderings of our target planet. As always, we have a rough idea where the Lanky population centers are located, but as always, our rough idea isn’t good enough for orbital strike coordinates. The Lanky minefield around the planet won’t let any fleet recon unit close enough for good targeting data. This, in turn, creates job opportunities for the Force Recon teams.

“We have the usual shit soup down there, which fucks with the sensors as always, but the recon drone got a decent IR fix on the northern hemisphere before they blew it out of space. They set up shop not too far from the old colony capital.”

The map behind the major zooms in to magnify the target area, projecting the tactical symbol for “unconfirmed settlement” over the topographical data. New Wales had been colonized for over fifteen years before the Lankies showed up and seized the place, so there was quite a bit of decent vegetation and agriculture on the ground before the ratio of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere got flipped around in the span of just a month and a half. Now it’s the usual Lanky neighborhood—hot, humid, and certain death for any human not in a vacsuit.

“Primary target area is designated ‘Normandy.’ If the cannon cockers launch our pods reasonably straight, you’ll be on the ground between twenty and fifty klicks from the edge of our suspected main settlement. Hoof it in, mark the atmo exchangers and whatever other high-value gear you see on your way in, and let the fleet guy do his job once you have eyeballs on Lanky City down there.”

Since we started taking the fight to the Lankies, 80 percent of my missions have been what we coined drop-and-shop runs. Because the aliens secure their new colonies with super-dense orbital minefields, none of our fleet units can get close enough to a Lanky-occupied world for accurate targeting data or reliable controlling of remote drones. The Linebacker space-defense cruisers can clear a section of the minefield big enough for a strike package or a salvo of nuclear space-to-ground missiles, but the recon teams need to go in ahead of time to get a definite fix, so the Linebackers won’t waste their limited loads of very expensive missiles. We drop, tag everything worth bombing in the target zone, and upload the information to the ships waiting out of reach. The Linebackers blow open a window, the carrier sends in a strike package or ten, and then the retrieval boats come to pick us up.

The tricky part of a drop-and-shop mission is always the ingress. The Lanky proximity mines nail everything man-made beyond a certain size threshold, and drop ships are too big and too man-made to make it through. That’s why recon teams get onto alien-controlled worlds by express delivery—ballistic drop pods, fired from the big missile tubes of capital ships. It’s one hell of an exciting way to commute to work.

“Suiting up at 0700 Zulu. Launch is at 0830 Zulu,” the major says, concluding the briefing. “You’ve all done this a few dozen times, so you know the drill top to bottom. Report any suit issues to the armorer, so we can plug in someone from the standby crew if needed. Good hunting, people. Dismissed.”

“How many drops is this for you, Grayson?” the recon team leader, Lieutenant Graff, asks me as we file out of the briefing room.

“Oh, hell, I sort of lost count,” I tell him, even though I know exactly how many times I’ve been fired into space in a bio-pod. Drop counts are a main measure of prowess among the Spaceborne Infantry grunts, and being blasé about one’s drop count marks one as a hardened SI trooper. “I think it’s close to two hundred now.”

“Damn. They really oughta come up with some new level for the drop badge. Platinum or titanium or something. You got gold four times over by now.”

“What about you, LT?”

“This’ll be number sixty-nine.”

“You counting the training drops, too?” I tease.

“Well, we can’t all be in demand like you, Grayson.”

“Be glad you’re not. I haven’t had any real leave since Combat Controller School. Would have been nice to trade some of those drops for some time off. I haven’t seen my mom in person since I shipped out for Basic.”

“You’re not missing much,” Lieutenant Graff says. “Next leave you get, make it a colony, or one of the rec centers. Earth ain’t much to look at these days.”

“You been Earthside recently? Where you from, anyway?”

“Houston metroplex. I went home on leave three months ago. It’s a fucking war zone now. You?”

“PRC Boston-Seven,” I say. “It was a war zone already when I left.”

“Kind of wrong, isn’t it? We bust our asses to keep Earth safe, and they shoot at us when we show up down there in uniform. Makes you wonder what we’re fighting for.”

I don’t have to wonder. I fight because the only alternative is to suck down recycled shit for food in a welfare city on Earth somewhere, and wait for the inevitable day when the Lankies conclude their interstellar pest control campaign against us by hopping into Earth’s orbit and nerve-gassing our filthy little ant hive of a planet.

I fight because it’s the only way I have to control my destiny at least a little bit.

It takes about thirty minutes to suit up in a Hostile Environment Battle Armor suit.

The HEBA suits are new hardware, relatively speaking. They were designed for offensive missions on Lanky worlds, and they’re so stuffed with state-of-the-art tech that regular old battle armor looks like a medieval suit of dented plate in comparison. The regular battle armor works on Lanky worlds, too, but their built-in oxygen tanks are too small, and their filtration systems get overwhelmed by the amount of biological contaminants in the air. The Lankies seed some sort of pollen into the atmosphere to kick-start their own version of agriculture, and a normal suit’s filters clog up in just a few hours.

The new HEBA suits have custom-tailored filters and a new oxygen storage system that lets a grunt carry enough breathable air for a few days of heavy physical activity. The armor is less resistant to small-arms fire than the standard infantry armor, but more flexible, and only half as heavy. The sensor package built into the helmet is advanced enough to navigate a starship: infrared, thermal imaging, millimeter-wave radar, ultrasound.

There’s a built-in trauma kit, and a superfast tactical computer to tie all the information streams together. Whoever designed the armor figured out that the visor is the weak spot in a helmet, and that keeping one from fogging up on a high-CO2 world is an unnecessary energy expense, so the new helmets don’t have visors. The lack of visible eyes, combined with the little bumps for the helmet’s sensor arrays, gives the wearer an insectoid appearance, so it took about five seconds after they released the first HEBA suits into the corps before someone coined the obvious nickname: bug suits.

The bug suits are custom-fitted to each wearer, and hideously expensive. The defense budget being what it is, they’re strictly limited issue. Only personnel with frequent business on Lanky worlds get one—recon, combat control, drop-ship pilots, and Spaceborne Rescue specialists. All in all, there are maybe three thousand troops in the entire corps who have a fitted bug suit. They’re strictly off-limits for missions against the SRA, because Command doesn’t want the tech to fall into Russian or Chinese hands.

I have a sort of love-hate relationship with my bug suit. It’s very comfortable, and the wealth of sensor input projected onto the inside of the helmet makes me feel almost omniscient. On the other hand, putting one on means I’m about to head out into Lanky country.

“Suits all check out,” the lieutenant announces. “We are ready for business. Weapons check, please.”

We all aim our rifles at the diagnostics target on the bulkhead and let the computers do the talking over the wireless network. Everyone’s carrying the new M-80 rifles, which are also specialized gear for use against Lankies. The old M-66 fléchette rifles are still in service, but only used against the Sino-Russians. The little tungsten needles fired from the M-66s don’t do much against the tough-skinned Lankies, so the new rifles fire twenty-five-millimeter dual-purpose rounds, a super-dense uranium penetrator piggy-backing on an explosive payload. The velocities needed for the penetrator to punch through a Lanky’s hide means a lot of caseless propellant, which in turn means monstrous recoil. It also means that the new rifles are vertically stacked twin barrels without magazines, because the recoil impulse is so strong that a multi-shot action would be impractically big and heavy. With only two rounds in the gun, the new rifles are damn near useless against the SRA, but they work quite well against the Lankies.

“All right,” the lieutenant says when we have finished the final weapons check. “Let’s go mess us up some Big Uglies.”

The recon team is four troopers strong: Lieutenant Graff, Staff Sergeant Humphrey, Sergeant Keller, and Corporal Lavoie. I’m the fifth wheel on this particular wagon, but nobody minds having me around, because I carry the radios that call down the thunder if there’s a need for it. We all drop in individual pods, to make sure the entire team isn’t wiped out if the launch crew miscalculates our ingress timing and shoots a pod right into the path of a Lanky proximity mine. The artillery people are good—the chance for a catastrophic pod-to-mine interface at ingress is only 1 percent—but two hundred missions mean rolling that particular set of dice two hundred times.

I strap into my bio-pod, which looks like an artillery shell carved out of rock. The mines don’t trigger for small, spaceborne inert objects such as asteroids, so our pods are designed to be a fair imitation of one. So far, they’ve worked as designed, but I worry before every launch that this particular one will be the drop where the Lankies have figured out how our recon teams get dirtside, and that my pod will be the first one to be blotted out of its trajectory by a newly updated mine.

“Final comms check,” the lieutenant says over the team channel. “Sound off, people. Give me a go/no-go.”

I listen to the team responding to the lieutenant’s challenge and add my own acknowledgment when everyone else is finished.

“Echo Five, copy and go for launch.”

“Echo One, copy we are go for launch. Comms go dark after this transmission until we are down in the dirt. I’ll see everyone on the ground in thirty. Echo One out.”

I give the launch tech standing next to my pod the thumbs-up sign. He returns the gesture and closes the lid of my pod. Immediately, my helmet’s low-light vision kicks in to compensate for the sudden darkness. There’s nothing to see in here except for the smooth inner surface of the pod’s lid, so I manually turn off the visual feed to conserve battery power.

The pod is loaded into the launch tube by an automatic feeder mechanism. At this point, I’m just like any other space-to-ground ordnance in the carrier’s magazines, except for the fact that I’m a biological weapon rather than a chemical or nuclear one. Ten of the Intrepid’s 144 launch tubes have been converted for bio-pod launches, so an entire squad can be launched at the same time. For the next twenty-odd minutes, my life will be entirely in the hands of the ship’s automated systems—the ballistic computer that calculates the proper trajectory for my pod to weave through the Lanky minefield and get to the target zone, and the launch mechanism that will fire my pod out of the tube at just the right velocity. One computer glitch, one power surge or bump at the wrong moment, one misplaced decimal point in a programming subroutine, and I’ll end up shooting past the planet into deep space, or finely dispersed in a cloud of organic matter in the upper layers of the planet’s atmosphere.

The worst part is always the moment just before the launch, when the pod’s bumpy ride on the ordnance carousel stops and you know you’re now chambered in a titanium-alloy missile tube like a cartridge in a rifle barrel. It’s the moment before the plunge, the last few seconds before the electric firing mechanism shoots the pod out into the cold darkness of space and right into the teeth of the enemy’s orbital defenses. Once the pod is on the way, my fear always subsides a little, but in those few heartbeats before a pod launch, I’m always nearly scared enough to shit my pants.

The launcher tube hums as the electric field is activated; there’s a loud whooshing sound made by the air rushing out of the depressurizing launch tube, and then I am pushed back into my cradle as the pod accelerates out of the tube at eight gravities.

I always hold my breath during a launch—not a difficult task at all, with the weight of the acceleration on my chest like a drop ship’s landing skid—and I only allow myself to breathe again when I feel the sensation of weight dropping away as the pod leaves the artificial gravity field of the carrier.

Some troopers start up their helmet displays on the way down, to bring up the tactical screen that shows them the precise location of their pod on the planned trajectory and the exact moment it will pass through the Lanky minefield.

I prefer to ride it out in darkness. I don’t want to know the exact window of my possible sudden death. If I crash into a mine, or one fires its yard-long armor-piercing penetrators at my pod, I’ll be dead in a blink. If I make it through, I’ll know by the sound of superheated air roaring past my pod as I hurtle through the upper layers of the atmosphere.

For the next few minutes, my pod streaks through the hostile vacuum between the carrier and the planet, and I’m in total isolation—sightless, deaf, weightless, and feeling like the loneliest person in the galaxy. There’s nothing to see, nothing to feel, no sensations to distract from the fear. Then my pod gets buffeted a little, and I hear the familiar muted roar of air rushing past the outer skin of my one-way ride. Five more minutes, and the main drag chute will deploy. I will drop onto a strange and hostile world for the 192nd time in my new career. Once more, I’ve won the roll against death and cheated my way past clusters of antiship mines that can turn a frigate into scrap instantly.

Of course, the ingress is the easy part of the mission. I’m about to set foot onto a Lanky-colonized world, and there are many ways to die a quick death down there.