Marko Kloos: Terms of Enlistment

The civilian emergency rebreathers aren’t quite as sophisticated as the NIFTIs on Navy ships. The civilian versions are little masks with built-in oxygen supplies and filters, but they lack the thermal imaging component of their military counterparts. Halley and I start passing the sealed emergency packs out into the main room, and for once, we have enough essential gear for everyone. We all don our masks, and prepare for egress. When Sergeant Becker opens the shelter’s hatch, I duck behind the Marine in front of me, but nothing dramatic happens. The first group of Marines swarms out into the dark corridor beyond, and we get the all-clear only moments later.

“No fires. We’re good to go.”

We file out of the room behind the Marines. The corridor is only sparsely lit by a few hand-held lights. The Marines can see in the dark with their helmet-mounted sensors, but the rest of us are all but blind, and we follow the Marines cautiously, stumbling over bits of concrete in the dark.

After what seems like a fifteen-minute procession through rubble-filled basement corridors, we reach a set of double steel doors. The Marines signal for us to stand back, and open the doors in textbook urban combat fashion, one fire team providing cover as the second team goes through. As soon as the double doors swing open, daylight comes flooding into the basement hallway, and we shield our eyes against the sudden brightness. The Marines file out of the corridor and through the open door in pairs, rifles at the ready.

“Holy shit,” we hear from above.

“What’s the word, Sarge?” Commander Campbell demands.

“It’s clear, sir, but mind your step. Lots of broken stuff everywhere.”

“Any sign of our friends?”

“Well,” Sergeant Becker says, and pauses briefly. “Sort of. It’s hard to tell, really.”

There’s a staircase beyond the double doors that leads up to the surface. To the right of the stairs, there’s a ramp for vehicles, too steep to walk up even if it wasn’t littered with broken metal and concrete. We walk up the stairs and into the light of the local morning sun.

The destruction on the surface is breathtaking. I turn around at the top of the steps to look back at the building, only to find that there’s no structure left on this end of the station. The Shrikes didn’t drop tactical nukes, but whatever they used did a number on this facility. There are steel girders and chunks of concrete strewn as far as I can see. What was once the front third of the terraforming station Willoughby Four-Seven is just a pile of smoking rubble now. A hundred yards away, part of the remaining building has collapsed, the floors pancaked into each other like the layers in a sloppily made sandwich. A multitude of fires is pouring dark smoke into the dark and rainy morning sky.

“‘Holy shit’ is right,” Commander Campbell says in an awed voice when he surveys the utter devastation. “This place is officially off the grid now.”

“They blew up my ride,” Halley says.

To our right, there’s only a barren, smoldering patch of ground where the administration building and the landing pad used to be. I can see smoking bits and pieces of what may have been a drop ship once, scattered over a wide area in front of the destroyed station.

“Fuel-air munitions,” Lieutenant Benning suggests.

“Anyone got the flyboys on comms?” the XO asks.

“Uh, that’s a negative, sir. The comms went out when those bombs hit. Marine field comms are a different band,” Sergeant Becker replies. “We’re down to bedsheets and smoke signals if we want to talk to the Navy again.”

“Where’d our new friends go?” Halley asks, shielding her eyes as she scans the area.

“I think that’s one of them over there,” one of the civilian techs says. He points to the partially collapsed section of the building, where something large and tan-colored is buried under a pile of burning rubble. “Part of it, anyway.”

“Where’s the one we dropped? The one that went down right in front of the building?”

I look over to the spot where the edge of the building would have been just a few minutes ago. When we abandoned our fighting positions on the roof, there was a motionless creature splayed out in front of the admin building, not a hundred yards away from the station, but now I don’t see anything bigger than a mess table in that area.

“Damn,” I tell Halley. “Those attack jocks don’t fuck around, do they?”

A few moments later, the Shrikes appear in the cloudy sky above the ruined station again. Without radio contact, we can’t tell them where we are, and for a very uncomfortable moment, I’m convinced that we’re in the middle of another bombing run. Instead of releasing ordnance, however, the two Shrikes just buzz the site at low altitude and waggle the tips of their stubby wings as they pass us overhead.

I walk over to a large chunk of concrete, sit down on it, and feel a sudden urge to just lie down in the wet dirt altogether. Halley walks up next to me and sits down with a grunt, not even bothering to use something solid as a makeshift seat.

“I have had my fucking fill of near-death experiences today,” she says.

All around us, the wind blows flaming debris around. The air is acrid with the smell of burning stuff, and no matter where I look, the ground is covered with bits and pieces of the building that was our shelter and fighting position just ten minutes ago.

“I hope this counts as a defeat,” I say to Halley, “because if this is a victory, I’d really hate to see what it looks like when we get our asses kicked.”

The Navy comes prepared for once. The two drop ships that descend out of the rain-heavy clouds thirty minutes later are loaded to the wingtips with air-to-ground ordnance pods. The Shrikes circle overhead as the drop ships land on the ground in front of the ruins of Willoughby Four-Seven. When the tail ramps of the drop ships lower onto the muddy ground, each ship disgorges a full squad of Marines in sealed battle armor.

“Glad to see you people,” Commander Campbell tells the lead Marine when they reach our ragged and tired group of survivors. “It’s getting a little unfriendly down here.”

“So we’ve heard,” the Marine says. Because his suit is sealed, his voice is projected through the speaker in his helmet, and he sounds disconcertingly artificial as a result. “Had a bit of trouble with the new neighbors, I see.”

We trot to the waiting drop ships while the newly arrived Marines bring up the rear. When I walk up the ramp of the closest Wasp, I see that the hatch to the cockpit is closed, and that the crew chief standing by the ramp controls is in full ChemWar gear as well.

The pilots of the drop ships do not waste any time with sight-seeing. As soon as our ragtag mix of civilians, Marines, and Navy stragglers is distributed onto the two Wasps, the pilots gun the engines and get the ships airborne before the rear cargo hatches have closed all the way.

“You pick up any more of my people?” the Commander asks the Marine team leader seated on the bench across the aisle from him. The Marine shakes his head.

“Not us, sir. But there’s SAR flights in the air all over this place. They sent down just about every drop ship in the battle group, I think.”

“What do we have up in orbit?”

“Carrier Battle Group Sixty-Three, sir. The Manitoba, two cruisers, two destroyers, and a frigate.”

“Hot damn,” the Commander says. “That’s a lot of tonnage to send our way.”

“We were in the neighborhood, I guess. Live-fire exercise out by Deimos. We were supposed to practice zero-G assaults, but then your buoy popped out of Alcubierre and started wailing.”