I know why he waited until I was off the moon before he climbed aboard his own ride.
First ones in, last ones out. Our profession makes us the first to put boots on the ground, and the last to leave the dirt at the end of a mission. This was an SRA settlement, so their combat controller made sure he was the last one onto the last ship off this rock. It seems that some traditions translate across our respective military cultures.
I strap into the last available seat on the crowded Wasp and secure my weapon. Behind me, the tail ramp whines as the crew chief seals the hatch for spaceflight. In the space down the centerline of the Wasp between the two rows of seats, I count five body bags. We’ve done our share today, sweated and bled onto SRA-owned ground to rescue civilians we would have left behind to die just a month or two ago. Maybe we are evolving as a species after all, now that we’re facing our extinction.
Maybe the Lankies should have showed up a few thousand years ago.
CHAPTER 2
I’ve been in the fleet for five years, hopping ships every six months after combat-controller school, and I’ve never been on a Navigator-class supercarrier until this week. The Navigators are the pride of the fleet, half again as large by tonnage as the next-biggest class of carrier and easily the most powerful warships anyone has ever put into space. But they’re too rare and valuable to shove into the kind of action I’ve mostly seen in the last few years, so I’ve never gotten to walk the decks of one until now.
The sheer size of the Regulus is exaggerated by the lack of personnel on board. I know the staffing levels of a carrier and the general amount of activity on board, and if I had to guess, I’d say that the Regulus is running ops with half her regular crew at the most. She was in for an overhaul and resupply at the Europa fleet yards when the Lankies appeared in the solar system and took Mars, and they pressed her into action with her maintenance crew and whatever personnel they could scrounge up at Europa. The NAC Defense Corps took the worst mauling of its history in the failed defense of Mars, and there isn’t much left to scrape out of the barrel. Regulus wasn’t ready for combat until the Battle of Mars was already over, and all that was left to do for her was to take her escorts and run. For all I know, Regulus may be the last of the Navigators by now. For all I know, we humans in the Fomalhaut system may be the last of our species.
The post-mission debriefing in the Regulus’s SpecOps detachment’s briefing room is an agreeably low-key affair. I was the only NAC combat controller on the ground, and the other fleet SpecOps guys in the room are two Spaceborne Rescuemen and a SEAL team from the Regulus, and three teams of SI recon from Camp Frostbite’s Spaceborne Infantry garrison. The Midway left half her embarked SI regiment at Frostbite when she tucked tail and ran with the rest of the task force.
I walk into the briefing room and take a chair in the back, behind the SEAL team and on the opposite side of the room from the SI recon guys. The short and violent bloodshed during our mutiny on New Svalbard is still fresh in everyone’s memory, and some of the SI troopers have given me hostile glances or made unfriendly remarks in the mess hall on our weeklong ride here. Until we’re back in orbit above New Svalbard, I’ll be doing my best to avoid getting caught in some low-traffic corner of this ship with half a dozen pissed-off space apes between me and the exit hatch.
The SpecOps commander on the Regulus is a hard-faced major named Kelly. He has prematurely gray hair and the worn-out, hard-lived look common to veteran fleet SpecOps personnel. Our lifestyle is extremely taxing on our bodies and minds, and most lifers in our branch look at least ten years older than their actual age.
“That was a by-the-book ass-kicking,” he says when he starts the debriefing by firing up the holographic display on the wall. “Zero podhead casualties on this one. One hundred seventy-nine confirmed Lanky kills, and another fifty-some likelies.”
We all cheer our approval in the appropriate muted and professional fashion. That’s by far the highest nonnuclear Lanky body count any unit has ever racked up in a single drop, and we did most of it the old-fashioned way, on the ground, with rifles and rockets and automatic cannons.
“How many SI casualties? And, uh, SRA?” one of the SEALs asks.
“Nineteen KIA, twenty-some wounded,” the major replies. “Don’t have numbers for the Russians, but they had a lot fewer boots on the ground.”
“That’s not awful for a drop that size,” the lieutenant in charge of the SEAL team says. That is of course a massive understatement. We would have taken at least three times as many SI casualties just going up against an SRA garrison battalion or two. And nobody has ever gone up against the Lankies with an overstrength regiment from orbit, but the last time they showed up while we had a force that size on the ground, they wiped it out almost completely.
“?‘Not awful’ is right,” Major Kelly says. “We just handed those skinny bastards a major ass-kicking going toe-to-toe, on their turf. If shit had gone half as well on the colonies the last few years, we’d have them on the run by now.”
“They were acting kind of odd,” I say, and most of the heads in the room swivel into my direction. “Anyone else notice that? They were nowhere near as aggressive as they usually are. Sluggish, almost.”
“Yeah,” the SEAL lieutenant says. “Like they were drowsy or something.”
“Maybe we got ’em demoralized,” one of the SI recon guys offers, and the SEAL lieutenant snorts a brief laugh.
“They were without their mother ship,” Major Kelly says. “Which is why they got their asses kicked, of course, but maybe there’s something else to that. Maybe they were short on something that went nova with that seed ship. Supplies? Who the fuck knows.”
“They didn’t have anything set up on the surface,” I say. “I went through all the recon data before and after the drop. Not a single Lanky terraformer, or whatever the fuck they call theirs. They didn’t even manage to tear down all the SRA stations, and that’s usually their first order of business. Two-thirds of the SRA terraforming network is still up and running down there.”
“If I had to guess?” Major Kelly says. “We blew up their chow and their building supplies when we took out their ship. There weren’t enough Lankies on the ground, either. Not for a colony takeover. There’s thousands of those things in a seed ship.”
“Those were just the advance recon team or something,” someone else in the room suggests. “Ship skips by the moon, dumps the advance team, goes gunning for that SRA cruiser, gets blown to shit by the New Svalbard people.”