Next to me, Sergeant Fallon holds up her wrist and shows me the chronometer she has strapped to the outside of her armor. The little screen shows “04:21:33.”
“Four hours, twenty minutes until the end of the world, Andrew,” she says. “This may well be the day we both cash in our chips for good.”
“You believe in an afterlife?” I ask, and she laughs.
“Nice thought, but no. Although there are some I wouldn’t mind. That Viking shit. Valhalla?”
“Where the brave go when they die,” I say. “Fight all day, feast all night.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad. Hope they sort me into that one, not the flaming purgatory shit.”
“I think you have the entrance requirements licked for Valhalla,” I say, and outline an imaginary medal ribbon around my neck.
“That stupid thing,” she says. “I didn’t get that for being braver than everyone else that day. I got it for not being dead like everyone else.”
We coast over the huge fleet complex on Luna’s surface at a speed that’s most definitely well above regulation. Combat Flight School has its own little spaceport facility, with hangars for their training ships, and it’s as large as the main spaceport on New Svalbard. Our pilot comes in hot over the base’s large VSTOL pad, puts the skids down, and initiates the automated docking sequence, all without bothering to ask for air/space traffic-control clearance. We rumble through the airlock into the cavernous drop-ship hangar of the fleet’s Combat Flight School, where every aspiring pilot of any combat spacecraft learns the ropes. Inside, there are rows and rows of ships in different sections: Wasps, Shrikes, a few Dragonflies, and two or three designs that are either too old or too new for me to know, because I’ve never seen them in the fleet.
There are maintenance crews milling about on the hangar deck, and some of them look rather alarmed when the tail ramp of our drop ship opens to disgorge thirty HD troopers in battle armor and with weapons slung across their chests. Some of the deck hands hurry out through the nearest access hatches as Sergeant Fallon’s troops spread out around the drop ship.
“Well, there’s no shortage of rides here,” Sergeant Fallon says.
“You,” I holler to a pair of deck personnel in mechanics’ overalls standing nearby and looking indecisive at this unusual display. “Go and get whoever’s in charge here. And hurry the fuck up.”
A very short time later, a group of officers in flight suits come running into the hangar from one of the access hatches. All of them have pilot wings on their suits. The officer in the lead is a soft-around-the-edges major who looks like he sits in a chair much more often than in a cockpit these days.
“This facility is not open for regular flight ops,” he says as the group approaches us. “What are you doing here in full combat gear, people?”
“Getting ready for combat, obviously,” Sergeant Fallon says. “We’re going to need every last drop ship in this hangar and enough pilots to fly them out of here.”
“Those are training ships,” the major says. “They’re out of the regular fleet rotation. I couldn’t sign those out to you even if you had the authority to ask.”
“Training is over. We have a Lanky seed ship inbound. They’ll be here in four hours. There’s a carrier with three thousand troops in need of a lift. If you want to start playing protocol games, I will shoot your ass and ask the next ranking officer in this place.”
The major looks from Sergeant Fallon to me, the only person in the group who is wearing fleet instead of Homeworld Defense armor. “Is this a joke?”
“I wish it were, Major,” I say. “I really do.”
“You are now part of what’s left of the global defense,” Sergeant Fallon says to the group of pilots. “Authority of Colonel Aguilar. He’s in charge of that big carrier floating in space nine hundred kilometers that way. How many pilots can you get on deck in the next fifteen minutes?”
“We have twelve instructors left on duty,” one of the officers behind the major says. He’s wearing the three stars of a captain. “We’ll be lucky if we can find all of them right now. It’s 2100 hours.”
“Get whoever can fly a drop ship,” Sergeant Fallon says. “What about the flight students?”
“None of them are qualified yet,” the major says. “The senior flight have solo hours, but they haven’t graduated. It’s still a month away.”
“They don’t need to fly combat,” I say. “Gear up whoever can get a Wasp out of a docking clamp and ferry it down to Earth. Tell the rest to take shelter. This is the big one, sir.”
“Sweet mother of God,” the major says in a shaky voice. Then he turns to the captain behind him. “Full alert, all hands on deck. Pull the qualified Shrike instructors, too. And all the flight deck crews you can find. Have the senior flight students assemble in the mess hall. Move it.”
The captain and two of the other officers dash off without even a salute. A few heartbeats after they’re gone, the base alarm sounds.
“Sir.” I catch the major by the sleeve of his flight suit as he turns away. “I need to find one of your instructors. First Lieutenant Halley.”
The major gives me a puzzled look. For just a heartbeat or two, I am convinced he’ll tell me that Halley was ordered off to active duty, or that she’s on leave down on Earth, or that he has no fucking idea who I am talking about.
Then the major looks over to one of the other flight suits, this one a first sergeant with a steel-gray buzz cut.
“Where’s Lieutenant Halley right now, First Sergeant?”
“Pretty sure she booked the last simulator slot for her class,” the first sergeant replies. “They’re in the simulator berth on sublevel three.”
I am past them and running for the hangar’s access hatch before he has finished speaking his sentence.
It takes me a little while to find the staircase to the lower levels. I take the steps four, five, and six at a time. I have no idea which room down here is the simulator berth, so I look into every open hatch as I run down the hallway. Overhead, the base alarm starts warbling, and the lights flicker once and then shift from white to amber.
A door opens down the hallway, and people in flight suits start pouring out of a room to my right and twenty meters ahead. They rush toward me, but I’m wearing battle armor and carry a PDW slung across my chest, and the group parts like water against a ship’s bow when I rush through them to go the other way. I reach the room with the open door and step inside.