Marko Kloos - Terms of Enlistment

He gives the admin deck back to me, and claps into his hands.

“We found a rest stop, people. Let’s go see if anyone’s home.”

The terraforming station is a huge, square building that looks like the factory box for a fleet frigate. It’s made of unpainted concrete that has weathered a lot since the terraforming network was set up over a decade ago. There are rows of smaller box-shaped structures all along the long edges of the main building, each of them crowned by giant, square exhaust nozzles that look large enough to land a drop ship in them with room to spare.

“Ugly, ain’t it?” Commander Campbell says behind us, giving voice to my thoughts. “Class Three atmospheric exchanger. They have sixty-three more of those on this rock. Takes a lot of money to terraform a planet like this.”

I look at the ugly, hulking mountain of concrete below us as Halley circles the complex at low altitude, and try to imagine over five dozen of these things lined up side by side. The sheer material cost of that network must be staggering, but it’s probably dwarfed by the amount of money it took to truck the machinery inside those atmospheric exchangers across forty light years of space. Suddenly, I understand why the Commonwealth is always short on cash, and why the welfare cities only get protein patties and recycled shit to eat.

“Anyone awake down there, keep your heads low. Navy flight Stinger Six-Two is coming in for a landing,” Halley broadcasts.

There’s a cluster of prefabricated buildings at one end of the massive main structure, and a gravel landing pad marked crudely with white spray paint. We descend over the landing spot, Halley putting the seventy-ton war machine down on the gravel so gently that I can’t even feel the skids touching the ground. The buildings of the outpost are undamaged, and I can see lights inside. Halley cuts the throttle and hits the switch for the rear hatch with the outside of her fist. Then she reaches overhead and throws a few important-looking switches, and the engines shut down with a prolonged whining sound.

“Let’s see who’s home,” she says.

Behind us, the Marines file out of the cargo bay, weapons at the ready. The Navy officers follow, looking a lot less martial in their work uniforms.

“Well, we might as well join in,” Halley says to me. “Unless they have a few tons of drop ship juice stashed away somewhere, this bird’s staying put.”

We unbuckle our seat harnesses and take off our flight helmets. Halley leaves hers on her seat, and I follow suit. On the way out of the cockpit, she pauses for a moment and pats the frame of the bulkhead briefly, as if she’s thanking a loyal steed for getting her to her destination safely.

I open the hatch to the weapons locker and take a rifle off the rack. Halley steps in next to me and takes a rifle as well. She checks the chamber of her weapon, opens a munitions drawer, and starts handing me magazines.

“You remember how to use one of those, don’t you?” I say, and she flips me the bird without pausing her task. I stuff a magazine into each of my leg pockets, and insert another one into the rifle. Being armed with a proper battle rifle again gives me a small bit of comfort.

With Halley charging her rifle next to me, I have a sudden flash of deja vu, remembering the times before Urban Combat Training back in Basic, when we got ready to do mock battles against each other, like a game of tag with armor and pretend rifles. Every piece of gear in this arms locker is designed for humans in battle armor to fight other humans in battle armor, and it occurs to me that we’re not prepared to stick our collective toes into the galaxy beyond our own little backwater star system.

“Eighty feet tall,” Halley mutters next to me as she’s slipping a load-bearing harness over her flight suit. “Makes you wish those MARS rockets came with nuclear warheads, doesn’t it?”

By the time we leave the drop ship to join the rest of the crew, there’s a welcoming committee waiting for us outside. A full squad of Marines has come out of one of the buildings to greet us. They’re all in partial armor, chest and leg plates but no helmets or web gear, evidence that our arrival has taken them by surprise. As Halley and I walk up to join the group, the leader of the Marine squad lowers his rifle and salutes our XO.

“Sergeant Becker, Sir. We’re the garrison squad. Glad to see the Navy’s finally in town.”

“Commander Campbell, NACS Versailles. Care to fill me in on what the hell is going on here on this rock, Sergeant?”

The sergeant exchanges unsure glances with his squad.

“We were hoping you’d tell us, sir. We haven’t heard anything from Willoughby City in almost a month.”

The terraforming station is staffed by a squad of Marines and twelve civilian colony techs. Even with our five Navy officers and four Versailles Marines added, everyone on the facility fits into the station’s mess hall with room to spare. Commander Campbell is the highest-ranking officer of the group by far, and he slips into his XO function seamlessly.

“You’ve had no comms with the main settlement in over three weeks?” he asks.

“No, sir. One morning, we were talking to them, swapping status reports—and then the feed dropped, just like that. We have run diagnostics on all the gear all the way up to the satellite uplink. It’s all working as it should.”

“Sergeant Becker,” the XO says.

“Sir?”

“Take your Marines and mine, and give me a perimeter guard around this place. Corporal Harrison is going to tell you what to look for. You see anything at all coming this way, you ring the alarm.”

“Aye-aye, sir,” Sergeant Becker says. “You heard the man. Let’s get busy, Marines.”

The Marines gather their weapons and file out of the room.

“What’s going on, Commander?” one of the civilians asks the XO. “Are we under attack by the SRA?”

“Well,” he replies, “the good news is that there’s not a single SRA unit within five light years of this place, as far as we know.”

“I’m guessing there’s bad news, too,” the civilian says. “Since you just sent out all the Marines to stand guard outside.”

“Oh, you have no idea,” Commander Campbell replies.

The revelation that humanity just encountered its first alien species shocks the techs visibly, but they seem rather more upset about discovering that we’re not here to evacuate them to a waiting Navy fleet unit, and that the ship that brought us here is probably dispersed all over the continent by now.

“Well, that caps a lousy month,” the supervisor of the station says after the XO finishes briefing the civilians on the events since we dropped out of the Alcubierre chute a few hours ago.

“Tell me about it,” the XO chuckles.

“Ever since we lost contact with Willoughby City, the weather’s gone all weird on us. We’ve been keeping tabs on the atmospheric data ever since we set up shop in this place, and I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“We noticed it’s awfully warm out there,” Halley says. “I thought this place was just above freezing right now.”

“We’ve been at five degrees Celsius this time of year for the last five years running, ever since the terraforming team handed us the keys,” the supervisor says. “Right now, it’s twenty degrees above normal, and the temperature has gone up by five degrees per week for three weeks now.”

“There’s a bitch of a storm system a few hundred klicks south of here,” Halley says. “Eighty-knot winds, and rain from ten thousand feet all the way down to the deck.”

“We got more rainfall just last week than we got in the three months before that. Lots of storms. But let me show you something a little more troubling.”