Chains of Command (5 page)

“My wife,” I say. “Halley, this is Gunny Philbrick. He was on
Indy
with me last year. Everyone else, too.” I point to the troopers with Philbrick, who by now have formed a semicircle around us.

“I heard,” Halley says. She extends a hand to Gunny Philbrick.

“Thanks for busting this dope out of the brig for me. Would have been a lonely wedding without him there.”

“I bet.” Philbrick shakes Halley’s hand with a grin. “My pleasure, Captain.”

“Where’s Major Renner?” I ask.

“Lieutenant Colonel Renner,” Philbrick corrects me. He nods over to the podium. “First row. She got a ringside seat.”

Then-Major Renner was the
Indy
’s executive officer when I spent several weeks aboard last year for our scouting run back to the Solar System. Apparently, when Colonel Campbell gave the order to get into the escape pods, she almost had a physical fight with the skipper in an attempt to stay on board. Almost everyone on
Indy
survived except for five people—Colonel Campbell, the two volunteers who stayed behind with him to man the helm and navigation stations, and two enlisted sailors whose escape pods were never found when the Fleet backtracked on
Indy
’s trajectory and rescued the survivors.

“How’s the hand?” Philbrick asks.

I hold up my left hand and wiggle my fingers.

“Looks like a hand again,” he says.

“Four days of misery at Great Lakes. Took them three tries to match the skin tone. It’s mostly for cosmetics. Waited too long to get the nerve ends fused back together.”

“That sucks.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Could have been worse, though.” I look over to the podium, where someone has set up a large printout of Colonel Campbell’s personnel file picture. There’s a black ribbon tied across one corner.

“Could have been,” Philbrick agrees.

There’s a minor commotion near the forward hangar bulkhead. We turn to see a group of people entering the hangar through the main access hatch. One of them is a short, slender, white-haired woman in her sixties. I recognize her from the footage of her inauguration ceremony a few months ago.

“That’s the president,” I say to Halley, who just nods.

“No shit,” she says. “She looks shorter in person, doesn’t she?”

“Word has it she was a Shrike jock,” Philbrick says. “Retired commander.”

I’ve seen the old president—the bastard who left Earth a year back with most of his cabinet and all the good combat hardware left in the Fleet—in Network news broadcasts plenty of times. He always had a phalanx of bodyguards around him whenever he showed up in public. This new president has two guys in civvie suits by her side, but they’re too soft-looking for bodyguards. There are also a few uniformed Fleet officers with her, but they’re all in dress blues, not combat gear, and clearly just guides. It seems that the new commander-in-chief has no anxieties about mingling with common troops without armed protection. Come to think of it, there are no security checkpoints in sight anywhere on the flight deck. I see lots of holstered sidearms, and the Fleet MPs by the forward bulkhead have their usual PDWs slung across their chests, but the president and her entourage don’t seem to care. Most of the new government is made up of veterans, and there’s definitely a new wind blowing in NAC state/citizen relations.

“Ten-hut!” one of the general officers near the podium bellows into the audio pickup, and we all snap to attention wherever we’re standing.

We watch the president walk up to the podium. The handful of generals by the podium salute her, and she replies with a practiced salute of her own. The president looks a bit tired, but her voice is steady and clear when she addresses the assembly on the hangar deck.

“At ease,” the president says. We all relax out of our ramrod-straight attention postures.

“I’m still not used to this,” she says. “Flag officers saluting me, I mean. When I was in the service, seeing this many general officers looking at me expectantly usually meant I was in some deep shit.”

There’s chuckling and some outright laughter in the ranks, and the president smiles curtly. Then her face turns serious again.

“I’d love to tell you that this is my favorite part of the new job, but it isn’t. Not by a long shot.”

She looks over at the picture of Colonel Campbell, regarding the crowd with that same wryly amused, slightly detached expression I knew well.

“More than half the time, this medal is awarded posthumously,” she continues. “As it is today. That means that every other of these awards ceremonies, we have lost someone we could not afford to lose. And there’s no doubt that we are all diminished for not having Colonel Campbell among our ranks anymore.”

She looks at the data pad on the podium in front of her. Then she picks it up and holds it for everyone to see.

“This is Colonel Campbell’s official Medal of Honor citation. I could read it to you word for word, all seven paragraphs of it, but you all know what he did. When we stood with our backs against the wall, when the Lanky seed ship was bearing down to destroy what was left of our Fleet in orbit, he sacrificed himself and his ship to buy us time. We are all still here, putting the pieces back together, because he decided that his life and his ship were a fair trade for the lives of everyone else. That is a debt that we cannot even begin to repay, certainly not with a piece of lacquered gold on a ribbon. But it’s a start.”

She puts the data pad down again and pauses for a moment.

“Colonel Campbell was supposed to scout out the secret renegade anchorage and retrieve his recon buoys. When he got word that there was a Lanky seed ship headed for Earth and less than three hours away, he made a different call. He set
Indianapolis
on a parabolic back to Earth, and then he burned all his reactor fuel to drive his ship as fast as he could. He had the crew take to the escape pods, and then he flew his ship into the approaching Lanky at close to one-thirtieth of light speed.”

Every time I play out the scenario in my head, I wonder what those last few moments in
Indy
’s CIC must have been like. What was going through the colonel’s head, knowing he’d blink out of existence in just a few seconds, never knowing whether his actions had made a difference in the end? I’m sure the colonel and the two others in CIC died in a microsecond when
Indy
disintegrated against the Lanky’s hull, and that’s not a horrible way to go, but the knowledge of their imminent deaths must have been dreadful.

“Colonel Campbell wasn’t the only one to die that day,” the president continues. “Not by a long shot. We lost so many in that battle last year. Too many. But he did what he did to give us a fighting chance. All of us, here on this planet, whatever nationality or alliance. And for that, a bucket of these medals wouldn’t be adequate recognition. But like I said—it’s a start.”

The rest of the ceremony is mercifully brief. The president does read out the citation for Colonel Campbell’s Medal of Honor, because that’s what you do at events like this. Then a Fleet major steps up next to her with the medal in a shadow box made of black lacquered wood. To a living recipient, she would present the award by hanging it around his or her neck, but the posthumous awards are given to the closest relative, mounted in a box because only the recipient gets to wear it.

I don’t know the woman accepting the award from the president, but I’m guessing it’s Colonel Campbell’s wife. She’s tall, with steel-gray hair that sits in tight curls on her head, and her expression is one of stone-faced detachment. I realize that I know next to nothing about Colonel Campbell’s private life. He was the executive officer on
Versailles
for the brief time I was a member of her crew, and then I didn’t see him again until our mission to New Svalbard last year, just before the Alcubierre network was deactivated and everything went to shit. I spent a few weeks on
Indianapolis
with him, but I never had the opportunity to talk to him outside of the CIC and our official duties, and now I never will.

When it’s all over, they play a slow and somber version of the Commonwealth national anthem over the PA system, the president mingles for a little while to talk to Colonel Campbell’s relatives a little more, and the crowd slowly starts to disperse.

“Well, that was uplifting,” Halley says. “Let’s get back to our quarters and do something fun. We have a day and a half off.”

“Hang on for a second,” I say. There are more familiar faces in the crowd over by the podium, and one of them looks over to me and waves in recognition.

“I need to introduce you to someone,” I say, and pull Halley with me.

“Andrew,” Dmitry says in his broad Russian accent when we meet up in the middle of the hangar deck. He grins and holds out a hand, and I shake it firmly. Dmitry’s grip is much stronger than his short stature would suggest. I know that he can punch much harder than a guy his size ought to be able to hit.

“Dmitry,” I say. “You’re about the last person I expected to see here today.”

“Here to award battle honors to commander of fine little imperialist spy ship,” he replies.

“You’re giving an Alliance award to a Commonwealth officer?”

“Alliance general staff gives award,” Dmitry says. “I just deliver medal.”

I turn toward Halley and nod at Dmitry.

“This is Senior Sergeant Dmitry Chistyakov, Alliance Marines. Dmitry, this is my wife, Captain Halley.”

Dmitry doesn’t salute Halley, and she makes no motion to extend any military courtesies herself. Instead, they just sort of size each other up for a moment, and then Dmitry extends his hand again.

“I remember picture. You are pilot.”

“I am a pilot,” Halley confirms. She takes the offered hand and shakes it curtly. “Pleasure to meet you, Senior Sergeant. I hear you had some misadventures with this knuckle-dragger here last year.”

“Misadventures,” Dmitry repeats with a slight smile. “Yes, we have many misadventures.”

Dmitry is wearing the SRA Marines’ dress uniform, which looks completely out of place in a hangar full of military personnel in dark blue Fleet and black-and-blue SI dress uniforms. It’s a gold-trimmed white tunic paired with black trousers, and black boots that are polished to a mirror shine. Underneath the tunic, Dmitry is wearing a collarless shirt that’s horizontally striped in alternating colors of white and blue.

“You came here just for the medal ceremony?” I ask.

“Was here already. On moon, on big Commonwealth training facility.” He pronounces the last word very deliberately, as if he has just learned it ten minutes ago. “For observing training of your space infantry. Give advice, take advice, that sort of thing.”

I’ve known for a while that we have started to exchange personnel and training notes with the Alliance—Halley’s Combat Flight School is hosting two SRA pilots as observers—but I wasn’t aware that Dmitry was one of them.

“You are in an NAC facility, and you didn’t send me a message?”

“Has been only three weeks,” Dmitry says. “Busy three weeks. Not much time for personal things.”

“The world is changing,” Halley says with a wry smile. “It’ll never go back to the way it was. Not now.”

“Not to old ways,” Dmitry agrees. “But give time. We find new ways to be
duraky
.” He winks at me and pats my shoulder once.

“You come see me at imperialist school of infantry, yes? We drink together, maybe see if you are better now at punching. You look like you need exercise. You get squishy around middle.” The word
squishy
comes out exactly like
facility
earlier—as if he had just picked it up not too long ago.

Dmitry winks at Halley and walks back to his own group, a handful of SRA and NAC officers standing in a small gaggle by the podium.

“That little bastard,” I say.

“I kind of like him,” Halley says, and pats the front of my tunic.

CHAPTER 5

Liberty Falls is only fifteen minutes away from the Homeworld Defense Air Station at Burlington, but getting off the maglev train always feels a bit like stepping into an alternate time and reality. I’ve always felt a bit like a foreign body here, a PRC rat among the upper-middle-class ’burbers, and the feeling is only intensified when Halley and I step out of the maglev terminal in fatigues, with sidearms holstered and our bulky alert bags over our shoulders. The new rules require that we are in uniform and armed while on leave, with a light battle kit in a bag within reach at all times in case there’s a Lanky incursion again while we are away from our duty stations. The alert bags hold lightweight armor sets, helmets, comms kit, and DNA-locked personal defense weapons with a thousand rounds of caseless ammunition apiece. If the call comes, we can be minimally battle ready and tied in to TacLink within a minute or two.

“All the gear makes us look like we’re planning to annex the business district or something,” Halley says when we see the third civvie in as many minutes glancing at us with suppressed discomfort. The armed forces have always been popular in the ’burbs, but even a year after the Lankies visited Earth without invitation, they’re still not used to troops in combat gear openly carrying weapons down here.

“You’ve seen the cops around here,” I reply. “They don’t even wear hardshell. Two good fire teams could take over Main Street and hold out for three days.”

Every time I come here, the place looks unreal to me, like a live museum exhibit or a science diorama blown up to life-size scale. Liberty Falls is a neat and clean little town, old-style brick buildings from two hundred years ago mixed in with new architecture, everything painstakingly designed to harmonize and blend the disparate building styles. The trees and bushes everywhere are real, and they must spend a small fortune every year planting actual grass in the little parks scattered all over town. This is an enclave for the well-to-do and the upper middle class, people who can afford living out among real trees where there are still pastures and empty stretches of wilderness. It’s only a hundred kilometers from the Boston-Providence metroplex, but this town might as well be on a colony moon somewhere for all the resemblance it fails to bear to the place where I grew up.

We walk across the small park in front of the maglev station in the center of town. It’s fringed by real maple trees—raised in a lab, no doubt, but actual living plants. Halley stops in the middle of the park and kneels on the pathway beside the neatly trimmed lawn. Then she runs her hands across the tops of the grass stalks.

“I know they have that at your parents’ place down in Austin,” I say.

“Yeah, but we haven’t been down there in six months. I always pet the grass when I pass some. Our line of work, you never know when you get another chance.”

I watch her with amusement. Then I drop my pack and kneel next to her to do likewise. The grass is soft and pliable, the earth underneath firm and cool. It occurs to me just then that none of the colony moons I’ve been to in the last few years have had any grass on them. When every gram of interstellar cargo is worth its weight in platinum, you don’t waste hold space hauling seeds for decorative plants. You bring seeds that can be turned into food or fuel.

Halley gets up and brushes her hand on the pant leg of her fatigues.

“Earth,” she says. “It has its nice little corners, doesn’t it?”

“Some,” I agree. “Give it time. We’ll find ’em and burn them to the ground.”

Our destination is on Liberty Falls’ Main Street, just past the old-fashioned redbrick library and the town offices. It’s a small restaurant in a building that looks like it was built before there was a North American Commonwealth. I know that the place, like half the shops on Main Street, is thoroughly modern inside and just looks like it’s two hundred years old. There’s a blackboard easel outside by the curb that has the specials of the day written on it in colored chalk. Out here, you can still get food that isn’t made with soy and shit, and the people who live here can afford meals that would cost a PRC resident a month’s worth of black market goods and a commissary chit besides. Even with the fate of the planet teetering on the edge of a sharp blade, there are still those who eat real beef in places where the cops aren’t even armored, and those who eat reconstituted crap in neighborhoods where the cops carry more gear than your average Spaceborne Infantry grunt.

“Ready for another dose of family?” I say. Halley pretends to check her nonexistent makeup in an imaginary mirror, then gives me a curt and pilot-like thumbs-up.

“Going in hot,” she says.

The inside of the restaurant has a vaguely last-century Mediterranean flair to it: stucco walls, cozy little nooks for the tables, and rustic-looking tables that would be worth tens of thousands if they were made of real worm-eaten antique wood and not its synthetic imitation.

Inside, there are no guests yet. A tall, slender man with a graying regulation-length buzz cut is wiping down tables with a rag. He’s wearing a server’s apron, and the sleeves of his shirt are rolled up neatly, revealing tattoos on his lower arms. He looks over to the door when we walk in and smiles.

“Well, look what the cat dragged in.”

“You don’t have one, Chief Kopka,” I reply.

“Health and sanitation regulations,” he says. Then he shakes out the rag he’s holding and drapes it over a shoulder. He wipes his hands on the apron and comes over to us.

“Good to see you, Master Chief,” Halley says, and gives him a curt hug.

“And you, Captain,” he says. “Still not used to Fleet sailors walking around with ground pounder ranks. You should be called a lieutenant. And wear bars instead of stars.”

“Pay grade’s the same,” Halley says. “That’s all that matters.”

“I thought you weren’t going to be in until tonight?” Chief Kopka asks.

“We got two seats on an earlier shuttle down to Burlington,” I reply. “Easier getting spots going down to Earth than coming back up.”

“Place is empty,” Halley observes. “Did you run out of food?”

Chief Kopka makes a pained little grimace.

“Sort of. We don’t open for breakfast anymore, just lunch and dinner. I haven’t been getting enough eggs and dairy in. The local stuff is getting stretched pretty thin.”

“I need to figure out how to say ‘Stretched Pretty Thin’ in Latin,” I say. “That’s pretty much our new motto now.”

“Sit down, you two,” the chief says. He gestures to one of the empty booths. “Can I get you some coffee, make you an early lunch? Kitchen’s warmed up.”

“We had food out at Burlington before we hopped on the maglev,” Halley says. “But I wouldn’t turn down a cup of real coffee.”

“How about you, Andrew?”

“I’ll take a cup,” I say. “And some cream if you have any.”

“Not a problem.” Chief Kopka walks over to the kitchen door. Before he reaches it, someone else comes out of the kitchen with quick steps.

“You’re here,” my mother says. “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming early? I would have picked you up from the station.”

“That’s precisely why I didn’t tell you we were coming early, Mom,” I say. “It’s called OpSec. Operational security.”

“What, I’m going to pass your location on to the Lankies or something? Give me a break.”

Mom comes over to where we are standing and hugs first Halley, then me. She looks relaxed and content. I asked Chief Kopka to get her out of Boston just before things went all upside down last year with Lankies raining down on North America in their pods ejected from a dying seed ship breaking up in Earth orbit. The chief not only got her out of the metroplex in time, he gave her a job at his restaurant and a place to stay. She now lives in an apartment that’s smaller than the welfare unit she had in the PRC, but she can breathe fresh air and touch real trees as often as she wants. Her clothing isn’t extravagant, but it’s clean and tidy and even fashionable, a far cry from the stuff she used to wear out of necessity.

“Sit down, the lot of you,” Chief Kopka says. “I’ll be right back with some coffee.”

We sit as ordered. Mom eyes our sidearms that clank against the backs of the chairs.

“You can take those off and put them in the office in the back if they’re in the way,” she says. “The chief has a safe back there.”

“No can do,” I reply. “Gotta have those on our person at all times.”

“Even out here?”

“Even out here,” Halley confirms. “Last year, those pods went all over the place. Most ended up in PRCs, but a bunch landed in middle-class ’burber towns. Cops with stun sticks fighting Lankies. You can imagine how that turned out.”

“We saw some of that on the Networks,” Chief Kopka says as he returns to the table with a steel carafe and a fistful of mugs, which he is holding bunched together by the handles. He puts the mugs down and starts pouring coffee. “At that point, I was wishing I had something with a little more pep than that stun gun back in the office. That thing’s good for nothing.” He slides into the booth next to Mom and pours himself a cup as well.

“A pistol isn’t much better than nothing,” Halley says.

“Against a Lanky, maybe. But I’m not too worried about those tearing down Liberty Falls. We get PRC riots again, next time they may spill farther north than Concord.”

The coffee is as good as I remembered it. There’s a world of a difference and a twenty-fold price increase between the soy brew they serve in the military and the stuff here in the chief’s little restaurant that is brewed from actual ground beans. Of all the decadences this upper-middle-class eatery has to offer, the coffee is among the cheapest, but my favorite by far. It tastes like liquid civilization.

“How long will you stay?” Mom asks. “Is your training job over?”

“Just a short leave,” I say. “We get two and a half days for Earth leave. Then I have to report back to the Depot to prepare for the next batch of recruits and meet my new drill instructors.”

“That’s not a lot of time,” Mom says with a slightly dejected expression. “They are working you to death. After all you have done.” She glances at my left hand, resting on the table next to my coffee mug, and averts her gaze again.

“Someone’s gotta train the new people, Mom. And there aren’t all that many left who can.”

We talk and drink coffee without having to watch the clock for once. The chief excuses himself to get back to the kitchen once we’ve briefed him on the big picture and the little bits and pieces of news that make him feel like he’s tied in to the rumor network sufficiently. Mom uses her privileged Network access for military dependents to forward messages to the chief’s old shipmates, and we fill in the gaps whenever we’re down on Earth for leave. Everyone is starved for information down here. They all want reassurance they won’t die tomorrow or next week.

We’re on our third or fourth cups when Chief Kopka’s place starts filling up with the first lunch customers of the day.

“I have to go back to work for a bit,” Mom says. “I’ve been spending too much time chatting as it is.”

“The chief is fine with that,” I say.

“Yes, but I’m not. I have to feel like I’m actually worth the room and board, Andrew. Do you two want some more coffee? Something to eat, maybe?”