Lines of Departure

^{CHAPTER 4} REASSIGNMENT

Time spent planetside: just a little under eight hours. Time spent in decontamination, medical post-mission checkup, debriefing, weapon return, and equipment inventory check: just a little under eight hours. When I finally fall into my bunk after grabbing some sandwiches from the NCO mess, I’ve been awake for close to twenty-four hours. Even without the no-go pills they offer to us after missions, I fall asleep almost instantly, dreaming dark dreams of ash and fire.

In the morning—or what passes for it on a windowless starship in deep space—I go over to the ops center to check on the results of our mission.

Our team wasn’t the only one to go planetside. Two more teams hit the dirt just after we did, to locate and mark two smaller Lanky settlements on the same continent. Both teams dropped with a combat controller. The other missions were less eventful than ours, and both teams made it back to the Intrepid without any casualties. Overall, the mission was an unqualified success—fifteen troopers on the planet tagged three major settlements and twelve atmospheric processors for bombardment, and the fleet dropped fifteen warheads, totaling a quarter megaton of yield. The fleet uses the lowest yields needed to get the job done, to keep the eventual cleanup to a minimum if we ever get to reclaim the place. In terms of personnel and material, we came out way ahead. We spent about a hundred Linebacker missiles to make a hole in the minefield, and fifteen nukes to wipe out the ground targets. With that material outlay, we caused a few thousand Lanky casualties and wiped out 15 percent of their terraforming capacity. But when it comes down to scale, I’m not sure our efforts made much of a dent. The Lankies will grow new terraformers in less than a month in non-radiated alternate locations, and our Linebacker has fired a quarter of its missile stores for just three artillery strikes. It would take a task force ten times the size of ours to scrape all the Lanky structures off New Wales.

Almost five years of getting our omelets folded by the Lankies, and we’ve just now graduated to light harassment. Five more years of this asymmetrical exchange, and there’ll be nothing left to defend.

We transition back into the solar system a day later.

“All hands, stand down from combat stations,” the CIC announces on the overhead as we decelerate into the empty space between Earth and Mars where the Alcubierre chute from Theta Persei terminates. The ride back to Gateway will take another seven days.

I’m about to grab some more rack time in my berth when my PDP vibrates with a noncritical message alert. I pull the data pad out of my pocket and turn it on to find that my nominal department head, Major Gomez, is summoning me to his office “as soon as convenient.”

“Staff Sergeant Grayson, reporting as ordered, sir,” I say as I knock on the bulkhead beside Major Gomez’s open office door.

The major looks up from the screen of his MilNet terminal and waves me into the room.

“Come in, Sergeant. Take a chair.”

I can’t exactly take one, since all the furniture is bolted to the deck, but I do as I’m told, and wedge myself into the space between the visitors’ chair and the major’s desk.

“What’s the story, sir? My promotion to sergeant first class come through already?”

“You just made staff sergeant—what, nine months ago?”

“Eight,” I say. I’d like to think that the major knows this fact off the top of his head, but he probably has my personnel file on the screen of his terminal right now, opened to the section with my promotion schedule on it.

“Well, then you get to wait another sixteen months in rank for the next chevron, just like all the other boys and girls on the promotion list. We just synced up with the Mars node. You have new deployment orders.”

“I heard she’s going in for a refit,” I say, and glance at the computer printout the major has picked up from his desk. “What’s it going to be this time?”

“You’ll report to NACS Manitoba when we get back to Gateway.”

“Huh,” I say. “How about that?”

“How about what?”

“Oh, I’ve been on the Manitoba before. That was the ship that saved our asses back on Willoughby when we bumped into the Lankies for the first time.”

“It’s a small fleet,” the major says, “and getting smaller all the time.”

He hands me the printout. I glance at it to verify the name of the ship in the field marked “DUTY STATION: NACS Manitoba CV-1034.”

“Trouble is, the Manitoba’s under way right now. They’re coming back from Lambda Serpentis, and they’re due back at Gateway fifteen days after we get there.”

“Well, shit,” I say.

With the Intrepid headed for the refit dock, I’ll have to spend two weeks in the Transient Personnel Unit, the purgatory on Gateway where people spend their time with busywork while they wait for their assigned ships to return from deployment. I’d almost rather do combat drops against the Lankies instead.

“Why don’t you burn up some of your leave, hop down to the old homestead?”

“I’ve used up all my leave for the year, Major,” I say.

“It’s January,” the major says. “You signed up in a January, didn’t you? Your next annual leave allowance comes available on February first. We won’t be at Gateway until February third. You need some downtime between drops, just like the machines.”

I was going to save up some leave time to spend with Halley, for whenever Fleet lets her take some time off, but then I remember that my girlfriend is stationed at Fleet School on Luna right now. Even if she can’t take any leave, I’ll at least be able to go up there on a personnel shuttle run to drop by for a visit.

“In that case, I guess I’ll put in for leave, sir. If I have to spend another day in the TPU counting towels, I’ll airlock myself.”

I’d love to share the news with Halley face-to-face, but vidcomms have to be scheduled ahead of time to conserve bandwidth, and she’s right in the middle of her workday at Fleet School. Instead, I dash off a message to her PDP across MilNet.

I send the message off to Halley and head back to my berth for some sleep.

When I wake up at the next watch change, I check the time on my PDP to find a new message on the screen.

I close the message and turn off my PDP with a smile.

Here we are, on the losing end of an interstellar war, with our world slowly falling apart around us, and I’m excited about going to see my girlfriend for a day or two. We may have gone from oar-powered galleys to half-kilometer starships in the span of two thousand years, but some things about humanity seem to be a universal constant, no matter the era.

It’s almost impossible for soldiers to have contact with anyone on Earth because the military’s network doesn’t talk to the civilian world for security reasons. They do let us send messages to direct relatives, though. My mother has a mailbox on the system as a “Privileged Dependent/Relative,” and she gets an hour or two of heavily restricted MilNet access per month. I know she treks down to the civil center every third Sunday of the month to collect her mail. Especially since during my first year of service, after Halley and I almost got killed on Willoughby when the Lankies made their first appearance, I started sending messages to my mother after a long dry spell of no communication.

At first I didn’t have all that much to say to her, so I used the mail system as a journal of sorts. After a while, she started sending entries of her own, telling me what was happening in her world. Mom is actually a good writer—she’s thoughtful and perceptive, and her updates let me see life in our old PRC in a whole new light. It’s a shame that I had to go into space and light years away from home to find out that my mother actually has opinions worth reading.

I compose a message on my PDP and tell my mother that I have leave coming up, and that I finally want to stop by for a visit Earthside. When I send the message out to Mom’s mailbox, I have the sudden urge to look for some sort of souvenir, something to bring back home for my mother as evidence of my activities, but when I look around in my berth, I realize that I don’t own a single thing that wasn’t issued to me by the military. Five years of sweating, fighting, and bleeding, with billions of kilometers traveled and over a hundred colony planets visited, and the only thing I have to show for it is a collection of colorful ribbons on my Class A smock and an abstract number in a bank account somewhere in a government computer. If I die in battle next month, there will be no evidence that I ever existed.

On the plus side, when everything you own can fit into a small locker, packing for a move is easy.