Marko Kloos - Lines of Departure

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.

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.”