Chains of Command (19 page)

“Yeah.”

“Well,” she says. “He seems to be a magnet for those kinds of drops. He gets off on doing suicide runs, I think.”

She sighs and scratches the back of her head.

“Well, however this mission goes down, I feel pretty safe predicting that boredom isn’t going to be one of our problems,” she says. “Shoulda stayed in my safe and cozy welfare city.”

CHAPTER 16

A few hours later, we meet up with our combat escort.

“Now hear this: replenishment personnel, stand by for transfer operations. NACS
Berlin
is now coming alongside to port. I repeat, stand by for transfer operations on port stations.”

As platoon leader, I have limited access to the tactical feed from the ops center. When I hear the announcement from the 1MC back in my office, I switch on the display of my terminal and check the situational plot. The center of the display shows a representation of
Portsmouth
. Nearby, in close formation, two ships are taking up position alongside
Portsmouth
: NACS
Berlin
and NACS
Burlington
. I consult the database on
Burlington
and see that she’s an older Fleet supply ship. I tap into the audio feed from the ops channel and listen to the strangely soothing comms traffic between
Portsmouth
and
Berlin
as the frigate is taking up position alongside the much larger supply ship.

“
Berlin
, decrease bow angle by one-half degree. Reduce speed by three meters per second.”

“
Portsmouth
, copy. Negative one-half on bow thrusters. Reducing speed to fifty meters per. Separation rate negative three meters per.”

“Burn lateral for positive three on my mark.”

“Burning lateral for positive three, copy.”

“Three, two, one, mark.”

I watch the slow ballet unfolding, a five-thousand-ton frigate maneuvering itself into parallel formation next to a fifty-thousand-ton supply ship in zero gravity with no external reference points, using only short bursts from the propulsion system’s thrusters to get into position. It amazes me every time I get to witness such a feat of engineering and training. We are so incredibly skilled at adapting to even the most hostile of environments, and so often we use those skills to be more efficient at killing each other.

There’s a knock on the hatch of my quarters, and I get up and walk over to unlatch it. Outside, Sergeant Fallon is leaning against the frame of the hatch.

“Sent the squaddies off to chow,” she says. “I’m going to take the NCOs over to the noncom mess and make sure we’re all on the same frequency.”

“I’ll be right along,” I say.

“Uh-uh.” She shakes her head with a little smile. “You, sir, are an officer. You get to dine in the officers’ mess with the other platoon leaders. Lieutenants have no business in the NCO mess. You know the rules.”

I want to protest, but then I close my mouth again. She’s right, of course—it’s a breach of unwritten protocol and courtesy for an officer to intrude into NCO space like that—but I can’t help feeling a little wounded. I’ve eaten in the NCO mess or at the noncom club for years now because that was my crowd. And now the stars on my rank sleeves lock me out of my usual places of refuge and socialization while on duty.

“You’re the boss now,” Sergeant Fallon says. “You have to keep your distance. Not just to the privates. To the NCOs as well.”

“Is that your advice as my platoon sergeant?”

“As your platoon sergeant and as your friend,” she says. “You don’t want the junior ranks to get too friendly with you. It’ll make your job much harder when you have to send them into harm’s way later.”

What she says makes perfect sense, but I still feel like I’ve just been locked out of my old clubhouse. I sigh and nod toward the module’s exit hatch.

“Go calibrate the squad leaders, Master Sergeant,” I say. “I’ll go check out the luxuries in the officers’ mess.”

The officers’ mess is not a bad consolation prize. Because
Portsmouth
is designed to accommodate mission personnel in addition to her regular crew, the mess halls are much bigger than I would have expected even from a ship of her size. And the chow is decent—not the fare we used to eat before everything went to shit last year, but not the almost-welfare food they’re doling out in the enlisted mess these days. There’s not even a line at the chow counter, so I grab a tray and choose from the small variety available: rice, chicken, and some leafy greens. At least the rank comes with a few perks.

Two of the other platoon leaders from my new company are sitting at a table in a corner of the room. I take my tray and walk over to them.

“Mind if I join you?” I ask.

“Not at all,” Lieutenant Wolfe says. “Plenty of space.”

“Yeah, this chow hall is something else.”

“Where’s the other Fleet guy?” Lieutenant Hanscom asks. “He too good to eat with us or something?”

“I have no idea,” I reply. “Haven’t swapped ten words with him since we came aboard.”

“Same here. If he’s out of SEAL country, he’s trailing the major.”

“I wouldn’t take it personally. SOCOM folks are a little weird. You think the branches are tribal, you don’t know how insular the podheads are.”

“You’re a podhead,” Lieutenant Wolfe points out. She nods at the beret tucked under the rank sleeve on my left shoulder. “And you’re slumming here with us.”

“Yeah, but I’m a combat controller. Most of my job is running around dirtside with SI teams. Slumming,” I add, and she grins.

“Spaceborne Infantry. Fleet SEALs. Combat controllers. And a mixed command crew. This is one strange company they’ve cobbled together,” Lieutenant Hanscom says.

“Here come some more of your Fleet guys,” Lieutenant Wolfe says and points over to the entrance hatch. I have my back turned to the hatch, so I have to turn around in my chair to see what she’s pointing at. A group of Fleet officers in flight suits are entering the officers’ mess. One of them is a woman with short, dark hair and captain’s insignia on her rank sleeves. I drop my fork as if someone suddenly electrified it.

“Son of a bitch,” I exclaim.

“What is it, Grayson?”

“That’s my wife,” I say and get out of my chair. Halley looks around the mess hall to get her bearings, and her eyes widen ever so slightly when she spots me. By the time she does, I’ve already covered most of the distance between us.

“Huh,” she says and grins at me.

For a brief moment, three conflicting emotions struggle for dominance in my head: joy at seeing my wife unexpectedly, anxiety at the thought of both of us being on the same dangerous mission, and anger at the fact that she didn’t tell me the exact nature of her assignment. Then the joy wins out. But kissing a fellow officer in the middle of the mess wouldn’t be appropriate or professional, so I just return her grin and shake my head at her.

“What the fuck,” I say. “What are you doing on this ship?”

The pilots who came in with Halley just sort of stream around us like the tide around a rock in the surf, but not without some of them shooting us curious looks.

“Flying a drop ship, silly,” she says. “It’s what I do, remember?”

“Why didn’t you tell me you were assigned to the recon mission?”

“I swear I didn’t know, Andrew. I went down to Fort Campbell this morning, and they briefed us and gave us new ships to take into orbit not two hours later.”

“Tell me you’re just ferrying.”

She gives me an incredulous look.

“They don’t use experienced senior flight instructors for ferry flights. Any flight cadet with brand-new wings can do that.” She smiles. “I’m along for the ride.”

“So what did you bring?” I ask. “Wasp-A out of mothballs?”

Her smile morphs into a wicked little lopsided grin.

“Oh, no,” she says. “Something with a little more punch than that.” She looks over to the rest of her pilot group, now standing in line at the chow counter.

“Want to come and take a look?”

“I’d love to,” I say.

I get a powerful sense of déjà vu as I walk down the main spinal passageway with Halley. In all our years in the Fleet, we have never actually served on a ship together officially since
Versailles
, seven years and several lifetimes ago.

“Whoever’s in charge of this run must have a lot of pull,” Halley says to me.

“Major Masoud is in charge of the ground component,” I say. “
Berlin
is coming along as our bodyguard. Lieutenant Colonel Renner.”

“It’s like reunion week,” Halley says.

“Oh, you don’t know the half of it. Why do you think the major has pull?”

“Because you kids are getting the very best battle taxi in the Fleet. In any fleet.”

“Dragonflies?”

“No,” she says. “Not Dragonflies.”

We walk back into the mission module space of
Portsmouth
. Halley leads me down to the ventral passageway, where I know the SEAL platoon is quartered in a crew module just like the one my own platoon occupies. She checks the status display next to one of the access hatches to verify that the module is pressurized and unlocked. Then she opens the hatch and gestures for me to follow her through.

“Whoa,” I say when I step into the module.

The module is mostly open space, a miniature hangar with an automated refueling station and service carts lining the bulkhead. There’s a docking clamp mechanism on the ceiling, a smaller version of the ones I’ve seen in flight decks all over the fleet. Sitting on the deck in the middle of the hangar module, and taking up most of it with its considerable size, is a very large and unfamiliar drop ship. It has some resemblance to a Dragonfly, but it’s quite a bit bigger, and it looks about five times as mean, which is no mean feat considering the aggressive looks of the Dragonfly class.

“What in the hell is that?” I say. “I’ve never seen one of these in seven years in the Fleet.”

“That is a Blackfly,” Halley says. “Don’t bother looking it up on your PDP. They don’t exist.”

“SOCOM project,” I say, and she nods.

“We brought four. That’s half the existing inventory. They belong to the Special Operations Aviation Regiment.”

There are maintenance personnel working on the bird in front of us. The refueling probe is latched on to the fuel port in the wing root, and I can see the thick umbilical of a service line snaking underneath the ship and terminating in a port hatch on the underbelly. The ship is all black, but it isn’t the rough, nonreflective paint they slapped onto
Portsmouth
to make her low-observable. This hull is almost mirror-smooth, and something about the way it reflects the light from the overhead fixtures looks familiar.

“Polychromatic armor plating?” I hazard a guess, and Halley nods.

“Same stuff they use for the HEBA suits. It’s made for long-range special operations insertions. Fast, agile, and freaking invisible.”

“How long have those things been in the Fleet? I’ve never even heard rumors about them, and I’ve done a shitload of drops with SOCOM.”

“The 160th used modified Dragonfly birds for their drops until this year. These just came off the assembly line maybe six months ago.”

“So they’re not battle tested,” I say.

“The prototypes have a few combat drops,” she replies. “Trust me, they do what they were built to do.”

“And how is it that you know about these and I don’t?”

“Because I’m one of the pilots who’s checked out on that type,” she says. “Most of the rest are eating lunch over in the officers’ mess right now. We have more of these birds than we have pilots who are cleared to fly them.”