Marko Kloos - Lines of Departure

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.