Chains of Command (10 page)

“Weapons free,” Sergeant Quinones shouts.

Six rifles bark out their thundering reports. I aim at the Lanky’s midsection and pull the trigger of my own weapon. The anti-Lanky round flies true and hits the creature square in the chest, and the huge head whips around in my direction. Lankies have no eyes, only long and pointed skulls with enormous cranial shields, but I could swear that the thing is looking right at me. It bellows out a wail that overloads my audio feed and makes my computer shut off the suit microphones. More impacts pepper its chest and lower body, and the creature stumbles. Then Halley opens up with her drop ship’s cannons, and the Lanky all but disappears in a shower of little explosions. It wails again and stumbles sideways. Then it crashes to the ground in a cloud of snow and ice. Halley follows it with the tracers from her guns without mercy. We add our rifle fire to the barrage, as insignificant as it feels next to Halley’s armor-piercing cannon rounds.

There’s a sharp crack, so loud that it cuts through the battle din like a knife. Between us and the Lanky, a new fissure appears in the ice. This one is less than a meter wide, but the sudden instability of the ground underneath my feet causes me to shout in alarm.

“Get back,” Halley yells into the comms. “Get out of there right now.”

We don’t need the exhortation. We all turn around and run the other way. I look over my shoulder and see another fissure open up in the ice, this one parallel to the first. There’s a rumbling in the air that sounds like a whole mountain is falling down. This time, I can feel the ground start to slant under my feet, and I redouble my efforts to do the fastest hundred-meter sprint anyone’s ever done in battle armor.

Behind us, my helmet’s rear camera shows the Lanky ship pitching upward thirty, forty, fifty degrees. Then it starts sliding into the large fissure, along with maybe half an acre of Greenland’s ice sheet, loosened by the impact or Halley’s cannon fire or maybe both. The seedpod and the chunk of ice it has been sitting on since it crashed drop out of sight and into the abyss with a rumble that feels like an earthquake. For just one heart-stopping moment, I think I see some movement in the darkness of the opening in the side of the seedpod. Then everything is gone—ice sheet, Lanky pod, and dead Lanky. The fissure in the ice is now twice as wide as it used to be in this spot. The Lanky pod falls into the darkness with a horrible grinding, thundering staccato that gradually decreases in volume from unbearable to merely painful.

When we are all far enough away from the fissure to feel that the ground won’t give out underneath us, we stop and turn around to look at the scene. Halley is hovering above the fissure and sending streaks of cannon fire into the darkness after the tumbling seedpod. There’s a huge cloud of ice and snow particles hanging over the crevice, and the searchlights from the drop ship barely cut through it.

“Son of a bitch,” Sergeant Quinones pants.

“Yeah,” I agree. “That almost went right down the shitter, didn’t it?”

“That crack must be half a kilometer deep,” Halley sends. “Maybe more.”

“I’d tell the Scandis to put a nuke down the hole after that pod,” I say.

“You think they can survive a drop like that?”

“You know how tough those things are. Not that they can do much down there in the ice.”

“Shit,” Halley says. “I’ve seen plenty of horror films on the Networks. I know exactly how this sort of thing ends.”

“The Scandis will deal with it,” I reply. “It’s their turf anyhow.”

“I’m putting down over there on the plateau for pickup,” Halley says, and marks the pickup zone on my TacLink display, five hundred meters away. “Sorry for the walk, but I’d rather not put down sixty tons of ship in your vicinity right now, or we’ll join that seedpod at the bottom of that fissure.”

“No, I’m totally fine with walking,” I reply.

The squad and I move over to the designated pickup zone and board the waiting drop ship, glad to have solid steel under our boots again. We strap into our jump seats, and I do an automatic head count as the tail ramp closes. The junior enlisted troops look scared, excited, and relieved all at the same time.

“Heading back up to
Berlin
?” I ask Halley.

“We’ve been loitering a little too long. I don’t have enough juice left to make it back to
Berlin
. I’m heading for the HD base at Thule. Tell your guys fifteen minutes until hot showers and chow.”

I relay the news to the squad as we lift off and soar into the bright polar night sky. Then I sit back in my jump seat and wait for the adrenaline in my system to start dissipating. The privates across the aisle from me start chatting in low but excited voices. They’ve had their first taste of combat, and they came out of it in one piece, which makes them more fortunate than they know. From the way they’re talking, I know that this drop will be the topic of many retellings over chow in the next few weeks.

Enjoy it
, I think.
Pretty soon you’ll get to the point where you’ll go out of your way not to have to talk about your drop.

CHAPTER 9

Two weeks after the Lanky incursion, the talking heads on the Networks still don’t talk about much else.

There are Network screens in the rec room—the boots have recreational facilities for after-hours and weekend use now—and there are more in the NCO club and the chow hall, so I get a steady trickle of news updates from the civil world every time I go for a meal or a bottle of crummy soy brew. The zone in Greenland where the Lanky wreckage landed is now a military security zone, and specialists from all the world’s big and small alliances are sifting through the remains, hoping for more clues about our enemy.

The civilian Network people are as clueless as ever, but there’s a noticeable change in atmosphere on the newscasts these days. People talk about events and military strategies openly and in an unstifled manner. I never realized just how carefully curated the news used to be in the days before the Exodus. Our climate of public discourse seems to have changed. But the civvies still don’t understand military subjects very well, and there are only so many well-intentioned but totally misinformed news segments I can take in a week, so I usually get my food to go and eat in the quiet and screen-free privacy of my platoon sergeant office.

I’m halfway through my sandwich when there’s a curt knock on the doorframe. I look up and see an officer in CDU fatigues standing in the door. I drop my sandwich and get out of my chair.

“As you were, Sergeant,” the officer says. “May I come in?”

“By all means, sir.” I sit back down.

The man who walks into my office is someone I’ve seen before a few times. The podhead community is very small, and some of its members are firm parts of special operations lore. My visitor is one of our branch’s celebrities, if the military can be said to have those. His name is Major Khaled Masoud, and he’s as much of a legend among Fleet special forces as Sergeant Fallon was among the old Territorial Army. There are fewer than ten living Medal of Honor recipients on active duty across all the branches of the military, and the man standing in my office is one of them.

“Major Masoud, sir,” I say. “No offense, but you are just about the last person I expected to see coming through that door tonight.”

The major smiles curtly. He is a short guy, about Dmitry’s height and therefore half a head shorter than I am. He’s probably in his midforties, but the lines on his weathered face and his mostly gray regulation buzz cut make him look a good ten years older. All the lifers in our high-stress, high-exertion field of work have much more physical wear on them than the career soldiers of other branches. The combined physical and mental stresses in the special operations business wear out even the fittest troops prematurely.

“Sergeant First Class Grayson,” Major Masoud says. His gaze flicks from the name sign on my desk to the area above the left breast pocket of my CDU tunic, where I’m wearing a combat drop badge in gold. Major Masoud’s tunic sports the same badge, but there’s another one right above it, superseding it in the hierarchy of awards and badges. It’s the highly coveted trident-clutching eagle, the Space Special Warfare badge, by far the hardest of all the specialty badges to earn. There are never more than a few hundred people in the Fleet who wear that badge on their tunics, the Space-Air-Land teams—the first molecules on the very tip of the sharp special ops spear.

“You’ve never done a drop under me, have you?”

“No, sir,” I say. “Not that I can remember. But I’ve dropped with a lot of your SEALs over the years.”

“I have no doubt. You’ve gotten around a bit since you decided to ditch the consoles and earn that scarlet beret.”

“May I ask what brings you here today, sir?”

Major Masoud nods at the empty chair in front of my desk.

“Mind if I sit down?”

“Of course not, sir. Have a seat.”

He pulls the chair away from the desk and then sits down, all with a precise economy of movement that would be worthy of a parade formation drill. Major Masoud is not overly muscular, but the arms sticking out of his sharply folded CDU sleeves look like taut steel cables. His uniform’s camo pattern is soft and faded—“salty” is what we call a well-worn-in set of fatigues—but the folds are neat and precise, and there’s not a loose thread anywhere. I’m suddenly keenly aware of the extra five or six kilos I’ve put on since I took this training supervision slot. I put the rest of my sandwich back into its wrapper and stow it in my desk drawer.

Major Masoud looks around my office. There isn’t anything personal on the walls, just rows of shelves holding hard-copy printouts of training manuals and other deadweight.

“Basic training,” he says in a neutral voice. “Do you like what you’re doing right now?”

“No, sir, I do not,” I reply. “It’s boring and repetitive. And I haven’t fired any live rounds in months. Getting fat on garrison chow.”

He smiles at that—curtly, just the merest hint of an upward tick of the corner of his mouth.

“But it has to be done,” I say. “Someone’s gotta do it. We need these new boots in the Fleet and in the SI. It’s important.”

“Yes, it’s important,” Major Masoud agrees. “Very. But having people with an MOS like yours do it is a terrible waste.”

He pulls a folded sheet of paper from the chest pocket of his CDU blouse and unfolds it.

“I went through the personnel database at Coronado last month and compiled this. It’s a list of every pod-qualified officer and senior NCO left in the Fleet.”

Major Masoud flips the list around in his hand so I can see the print side. It’s just a standard-size printout, and the print isn’t particularly large or widely spaced, but the two columns of names on the page don’t even fill two-thirds of the sheet.

“That’s all?” I ask.

“That is all,” Major Masoud confirms. “Three-quarters of our qualified special operations personnel were deployed when the Lankies blockaded the nodes and attacked Mars. Forward-deployed on colonies, assigned to carrier strike groups, playing security detachments for high-value extrasolar bases . . . you know the drill.”

He puts the sheet of paper away again and carefully closes the pocket on his tunic.

“We lost half our active SEALs and SI recon teams when they threw everything at Mars to stop the Lankies. Most of the rest are cut off from the Solar System, if they’re still alive. We may be short on recruits right now, but we are looking at bare cupboards in the podhead section of the pantry. Training basic SI riflemen and -women takes six months. You know how long it takes to train a special ops MOS.”

“Yes, sir, I do,” I reply. When I switched to the combat controller MOS—the nutcase track, as Halley calls it—I spent the next year in various specialist schools, even though I was already a fully trained and qualified Territorial Army rifleman. And some podhead jobs—SEALs and Spaceborne Rescuemen among them—take almost twice as long to train.

“Some corners can’t be cut,” I add. Major Masoud rewards this statement with another tiny smile.

“That is a fact,” he says. Then he sighs and folds his arms across his chest.

“We are going back to Mars,” he says. “The decision has been made. The counteroffensive starts in ninety-eight days, right after this training cycle. One more batch of warm bodies to fill the seats in the drop ships.”

The news isn’t unexpected, but I still feel a great deal of anxiety welling up inside me at the finality in the major’s tone of voice.

“When was this decided, sir? I didn’t hear anything about it. Not even rumors.”

“Last week. Just days after that Lanky blew through the picket and smacked into Greenland. The new SecDef and the joint chiefs. And everyone in the Corps with gold on their shoulder boards. I snuck in with the SOCOM commander as part of the SEAL delegation.”

I’m not nearly high enough in rank or function to be part of joint-chiefs-level strategy meetings, but I’m a little angry at this revelation anyway. With an all-new cabinet loaded with veterans, a combat vet for a president, and a leadership structure that has been completely redone out of necessity, I had hoped that we were beyond having a bunch of old guys decide everyone’s fate in secret meetings. But I guess the military still works the way it used to, and that some conventions can’t just change in a month or a year.

“With all due respect, sir—I’m not sure we’re ready for that,” I say.

“No, we are not,” Major Masoud says. “Not enough troops, not enough warships. For damn sure not enough of those new missiles. Three months from now is not enough time.”

“So we’re going to run our heads against the wall again? After what happened last year?”

“Oh, there was debate,” he says. “Lively debate. It basically came down to two options. Assault Mars with what we have, as soon as we can, and scrape the Lankies off the planet before they can settle in any further. Use the Orions to shoot down the seed ships and then slug it out on the ground. Hope that we can take them toe to toe once their air and space superiority is gone. After your little adventure in Fomalhaut last year, a lot of people started to see that as a realistic option.”

“They are easier to kill with Shrikes and drop ships overhead for close air support. But ‘easier’ isn’t ‘easy.’ And there are thousands of them on Mars by now.”

“There are still human holdouts there,” the major says. “If we get back there and kick the Lankies off successfully, we’ll not only get the planet back; we may also rescue a few thousand personnel. Maybe a few ten thousand. It’s a high-risk op, but I can’t blame the people who say that we can’t not go.”

“I concur, sir,” I say, but I’m not sure I even want to know what the major has to say next.

“We know where the Exodus fleet went,” Major Masoud says. “They analyzed the comms and data traffic the drones from
Indianapolis
captured while they were on station. We have everything. Coordinates, access codes, ship lists. They finished the decryption last month, right before the Lanky incursion.”

“No shit. I thought Fleet encryption was unbreakable.”

The major allows himself another tiny smile.

“They beat their heads against the wall with it for six months. Rumor has it they finally asked for help from our new allies in the SRA, and the Chinese crypto division had it cracked in two weeks.”

I laugh out loud.

“They didn’t just take all the best of the Fleet gear,” Major Masoud continues. “They have stuff that never even made it into the Corps. They had their own R&D department. Most of their gear is made to fight Lankies. Those battleships we found unfinished were just part of it.”

“Anti-Lanky gear,” I repeat. “A whole task force full of it. Would come in handy for the Mars counterstrike.”

“Very,” Major Masoud says. “I see you are thinking like most of the SOCOM guys at that meeting.”

“So why aren’t we doing that? Go after the Exodus fleet, reclaim the gear, then use all that to take back Mars?”

“Time,” he says. “That op would take time and possibly cost us a large pile of casualties that we can ill afford at the moment. Those traitors took a lot of combat power with them. A dozen warships, all top of the line. And God knows what they stashed in their hideout system before the Lankies forced their early departure. For all we know, they have half a dozen of those new battleships waiting on the other side of the chute when we go after them in force.”

“Well, we won’t know for sure until we go have a look.”

The major gets out of his chair and walks over to the door. Then he pokes his head out into the hallway as if he wants to make sure nobody is eavesdropping out there. Satisfied, he walks over to my documentation shelf and studies the terribly uninteresting spines of the training manuals.

“Like I said—there were two camps of opinion at the joint chiefs meeting. One group favored the ‘Mars First’ approach. The other group voted to go after the Exodus traitors first and then use the reclaimed assets and personnel to increase the success chance of the Mars assault. We will only get one shot at retaking Mars. Once we are committed, all the chips will be in play. Do or die. Most of SOCOM are in the second camp, but we were outvoted, so Mars First it is.”

“However,” I say.

Major Masoud flashes a grin that is entirely devoid of humor or good cheer. I know he wouldn’t be here if that was all there was to the joint chiefs meeting.

“However,” he repeats. “SOCOM got concessions. I am putting together a special operations mission to scout the Exodus system and assess enemy disposition prior to the Mars assault. And I want you on board with us.”

It takes me a few moments to process this information. I know I’m a fairly competent specialist in my field, but I also know that I’m nowhere near the top of the field in the podhead community, whether by ability or rank. I’m certainly not high enough in the hierarchy to have a senior SEAL and Medal of Honor recipient personally request my membership on a mission.

“Sir, why would you need a combat controller on a deep-space recon mission?” I ask.

“I don’t need you in your primary MOS,” Major Masoud says. “I am taking a company of podheads along, and I want you to lead one of the platoons.”

I make a mental note to myself to check the sandwich I just ate for contamination. Right now, nothing other than foodborne illness would explain the slide into surreal territory the day has taken since I started eating my lunch.