Chains of Command (14 page)

“Good evening,” I say when I am in hailing distance. The squad leader wears the old insignia of a sergeant on the sleeves of his olive-drab fatigue jacket, three chevrons pointing up. To my surprise, he sketches a salute, albeit a perfunctory one.

“Evening,” he says. “What brings you to our side of the river, Lieutenant?”

“I hear the food is better,” I say, and some of the militia troopers nearby laugh.

“No, it ain’t,” the sergeant says.

I look at the way he carries his rifle, suspended from a single-point sling and hanging diagonally in front of his body. He has his finger properly indexed alongside the trigger guard.

“You prior NAC service?” I ask.

He nods. “Two years HD.”

“I’m here to see someone,” I say. “I was told to ask you to contact this network node and tell them that Lieutenant Andrew Grayson is asking for a pickup.”

I pull my PDP out of my pocket, unlock it with my fingerprint, and show the screen to the militia sergeant. He looks at the device with mild surprise.

“Deion,” he says to one of the other militia troopers. “Get on the link and send a message to node 679-Alpha. Tell them there’s a Lieutenant Grayson from Fleet asking for passage.”

“Copy that,” the trooper says and walks off toward the nearest alley mouth behind the barriers. Maybe a minute later, he returns.

“They’re sending a ride for you, Lieutenant. ETA forty-five minutes.”

“Any place I can sit while I wait?” I ask.

The sergeant points to the nearby concrete barriers. I sigh and take off my alert bag. Then I walk over to the nearest barrier and sit down in front of it, too tired to care or argue.

A little over an hour later, two noisy military vehicles show up at the end of the street on the militia-controlled side and roll toward the checkpoint. They’re ancient, gasoline-burning designs straight out of a military history book, utility all-terrain vehicles of the kind that were once used by the army of the old United States. They’re square and flat-bottomed, with large, knobby, honeycomb tires. There’s a gunner standing up in the roof hatch of each vehicle, and they are both manning pintle-mounted automatic guns with air-cooled barrels. The small column comes to a halt twenty meters short of the checkpoint, and the headlights from the lead all-terrain illuminate the scene harshly until the driver kills the lights. The doors of the lead vehicle open, and three militia troopers climb out. I recognize the one from the passenger seat right away.

“Major Jackson,” I greet the tall, dark-skinned woman wearing gold oak leaves on her collars. I offer a salute, which she returns before holding out her hand to shake mine.

“Good to see you again,” she says, and startles a little when she sees my shoulder sleeves. “Lieutenant. Moving up on the ladder.”

“Not as high as you, Major.”

“And you thought they were going to arrest you last year,” she says. “Told you they got bigger fish to fry.”

“Precisely why I’m here to talk to the general,” I say.

“Well, jump in and take a seat,” she says. “Just don’t crack any windows on the journey. Some rough neighborhoods on the way, Brigade or not.”

“You’re going to take my gun bag and dog tags for the ride?”

“No need. We’re not hiding out anymore. And you’ll need that buzz gun if we take a wrong turn.”

On the ride into Detroit proper, we pass many scars in the rows of houses and tenement high-rises lining the streets. There are half-gone buildings standing next to occupied ones, and ruins that amount to not much more than charred foundations and twisted steel sticking out of concrete rubble piles. I always thought I’d never go back into this city unless ordered at gunpoint, right until last year when Halley dropped her ship and the platoon in its hold right into the middle of the place in pursuit of a Lanky seedpod. I didn’t have much time to reflect on my fear a great deal then, but I definitely have unwelcome flashbacks as we roll through the summer night.

“Those guys back at the checkpoint were agreeable,” I tell Major Jackson. “Almost courteous.”

“Fleet remnants got a lot of credit last year when you showed up and went right after the Lankies,” Major Jackson says. “SI, too. Defending the civvies, that went over well. You didn’t run like the rest of ’em did.” Her expression darkens. “Deserting the planet. Leaving us to clean the mess.”

“What about HD?”

“We don’t kill each other on sight, if that’s what you mean. But no, HD ain’t precisely very welcome around here on most days. Didn’t hear shit out of Dayton the night the Lankies dropped in. You Fleet and SI people made it all the way from orbit, but they couldn’t be assed to come the hundred fifty klicks from Shughart to help out. If Homeworld Defense don’t defend the home world, the fuck are they good for?”

An hour into our ride, we are right in the middle of Category 5 PRC country, the latest and greatest residence clusters with high-rise towers that are a hundred floors tall. Without a suit computer, I have lost my bearings, so I have no idea where in Detroit I am, and the Cat 5 blocks all look the same wherever you go. Our battle against the Lankies last year took place in the middle of a few Cat 5 blocks. One drop ship, one platoon of troops, half a dozen Lankies, and tens of thousands of frightened civilians. I wouldn’t have bet anything on our survival if someone had told me the odds before the battle, and I’m still amazed that we walked out of there alive. But I take some solace in the fact that throughout our sixty-minute journey, nobody fired a single shot at us as we passed through much of Detroit’s outskirts.

Our ride ends at the foot of a residence cluster. The all-terrain cars descend down a concrete ramp that leads below one of the enormous three-hundred-meter towers that make up each corner of a Category 5 PRC cluster. We pass through a set of steel doors and then into a subterranean passageway wide enough for two cars side by side. Then the space opens up, and we come to a halt in a large underground garage. It’s well lit, and there are at least a dozen more of the old all-terrain vehicles lined up alongside the walls in individually marked bays. More militia troops in olive-drab fatigues are milling around down here, working on cars or loading gear, and a few of them even spare our little column a second look as our driver kills the engine, and we disembark.

“Safe the guns and stow the ammo,” Major Jackson tells her crews. “Come with me, Lieutenant. I’ll take you upstairs.”

“Aye-aye, ma’am,” I reply and follow her dutifully, not keen on drawing attention in this place by stepping a foot away from where I’m expected to be.

“Upstairs” really means upward. We step into an elevator that whisks us to the fiftieth floor of the PRC tower. Then we walk a small gauntlet of checkpoints, all guarded by very fit-looking and heavily armed militia troops that wouldn’t look out of place in an SI ready room. I notice that up here, the troops carry more modern weaponry, current-issue PDWs and M-66 fléchette rifles—stuff that will defeat modern battle armor at close range.

We take another elevator that carries us the rest of the way up the tower to the hundredth floor. There’s a final checkpoint up here, but the armored militiamen step aside and let us through when they see Major Jackson. Nobody has even asked me to surrender the alert bag on my back or the sidearm on my hip. With all the armed personnel around here, I suspect I’d have a really short life expectancy if I pulled out my weapon and started popping off rounds.

Major Jackson leads me into an empty briefing room. There’s a large table with a bunch of mismatched chairs around it, and the major gestures toward it.

“Have a seat, Lieutenant. I’ll let the general know you’re here. Shouldn’t be long.”

“Thank you, Major. Good to see you again.”

“And you.” She exits the room and leaves the door open as she walks out.

The briefing room has tall floor-to-ceiling polyplast windows that look like they’re about five centimeters thick. Outside, the sprawl of the PRCs extends as far as I can see, which isn’t very far despite my vantage point three hundred meters up. There’s a perpetual haze over the large metroplexes that gets illuminated from all the city lights below at night. The incandescent, dirty fog surrounds and envelops the city like an impenetrable dome. From this height, it has a certain beauty to it. I sit down in one of the chairs next to the window, put my alert pack aside, and watch the city outside for a little while. I’ve been in a PRC many times before, but this is the first time as a soldier where I’m by myself, a hundred kilometers or more away from the nearest brothers and sisters in arms. If there’s any trouble tonight, I’ll be on my own, with nobody around to help me or even bite the bullet with me. I look up into the sky, but the glowing haze above the city is dense, and I can’t see the moon, where Halley is probably sleeping in our quarters right now.

A short time later, General Lazarus walks into the room, a data pad in his hand and a tired look on his face. I get out of my chair, but he waves me off curtly before I can salute.

“As you were, Lieutenant. Sit down.”

I do as I am told and put my butt back into the chair. General Lazarus walks over to where I am sitting, pulls out another chair, and sits down in front of me with a small sigh. Then he puts the data pad onto the conference table next to him and stretches his neck.

“Long day,” he says. “They all are, lately.”

“Yes, sir,” I say.

The general looks older than he did last year, more so than the time since our last meeting would justify. His close-cropped hair has quite a bit more gray and silver in it, and there’s deep fatigue evident around his eyes. But he’s still muscular and taut, and he still radiates competence. I don’t know what his name was before he called himself Lazarus, and I never checked the database to ferret out his service record from his Marine days, but I know that his occupational specialty involved breaking people and their stuff. There’s an air of quiet danger around him that tells me he wasn’t a personnel officer or supply group supervisor when he was still wearing a Marine uniform.

“What brings you here tonight? Have you reconsidered my offer from last year? Ready to get out of the Fleet and make a contribution here on the ground?”

“Sticking with the Fleet for now,” I say. “At least until the job is done.”

“It’s never done,” he says. “Even if we get the Lankies out of the Solar System, there’ll always be a new furnace to feed new recruits into. Sooner or later we’ll kill each other again if we have no Lankies to shoot at anymore.”

“How well are you tied in to Corps intel?” I ask. General Lazarus shakes his head slightly and smiles.

“Let’s just say ‘well enough,’ and leave it at that.”

“Then you know there’s a major operation coming up.”

“You don’t need to have your finger on the pulse of the Intel division to know that. It’s the next logical step. Stop the Lanky incursions, push them back before they figure out to send everything they have at us at once one day. But yes,” he continues, “I have heard about the operation.”

“Three months,” I say. “I just spent two training cycles at Orem to help churn out new bodies for the infantry and the Fleet. I can tell you that we’re nowhere near ready for an op of that size.”