“Advance team gets stranded without support on the SRA moon,” Major Kelly adds. “So we basically kicked their asses because they were underfed and aimless.”
The major’s statement hangs in the room for a moment like an unwelcome after-lunch fart. Nobody wants to think that our first major military success against the Lankies—heroic rescue of colonists!—was mostly due to the fact that the Lankies may have been too weak to put up a decent fight. Then Major Kelly shrugs and shakes his head.
“Whatever. Don’t really give a shit about the why and how. Most of our guys made it back, and most of theirs are full of holes. That’s a successful mission right there. Too bad it probably won’t make a damn bit of a difference in the long run. Go and relax, people. We have a six-day ride back to New Svalbard. May be the last R and R any of us get for a long time.”
Or for good, I think. I check my new loaner PDP for the date. It’s April 3, 2116, and I have less than three months to get back home to Earth if I don’t want to be late for my own wedding. I don’t know if Earth is still there, but I don’t even want to contemplate the possibility that Halley may not be there anymore. If this refugee United Nations strike force is going back to the solar system, I’m going, too.
The Regulus has state-of-the-art recreational facilities for its crew. I’ve seen a lot of fleet rec centers in my service—Halley and I usually get together at RecFacs whenever we have leave together, because we’re often too far away from Earth to make it back there before our leave time is up—and I can say that this one is the nicest I’ve seen yet. Still, I can’t get any enjoyment out of any of the offerings. It all seems so trite all of a sudden—simulators, canned Network shows bundled for fleet personnel who may be on deployment for a show’s entire Earthside run, pool and gaming holotables, and dozens of other ways for stressed-out warfighters to turn off their brains and find some diversion. All this stuff seems pointless now, with most of the fleet gone and the solar system under siege by a near-unbeatable enemy. I realize that I never liked the RecFacs anyway, and that I only ever enjoyed them because they were the only places where I got to spend some alone time with Halley in the private berths.
At least the place has sports facilities for team games and solitary workouts, so I use my downtime to sweat. There’s a running track that winds its way through the rec deck of the Regulus, and because it’s a big ship, it’s a long track, two kilometers of black rubberized decking with a fat white line running down the center, snaking through the many compartments. It’s quite possibly the height of vanity, considering the overall state of humanity right now, but sitting on New Svalbard, I put on a few extra pounds with the mess-hall chow at Camp Frostbite, and I want to be in the best possible shape when I see my fiancée again. There’s a better-than-even chance my once again trim body will be an expanding cloud of superheated debris in a few weeks, long before we get even within sight of Earth, but running is a good thing to do right now. It feels normal, and I can stand some of that at the moment, because everything else doesn’t.
I don’t belong on this ship. I have a loaner berth and a loaner armor set, but I don’t know a soul on the Regulus. The SI troopers from the Midway who embarked with me on this drop are quartered in the section of the ship that usually hosts the Regulus’s own SI regiment. I took a berth in the NCO quarters of the fleet section, well away from the Midway grunts, and with the Regulus running a skeleton crew, it’s a pretty quiet run back to New Svalbard. For the first time in weeks, I don’t have access to an all-seeing ship network or external sensor arrays, and I’m just another passenger. I sleep, I eat, I work out, and I go out of my way not to have to talk to anyone except the occasional SEAL or Spaceborne Rescue podhead in line for chow. When we arrive back in orbit over New Svalbard after six days of boring and uneventful interplanetary cruise, I’m so bored that I almost wish we had another Lanky on our tail and just a few days to find a way to kill it.
“You look like you need some of the local rotgut,” Sergeant Fallon says by way of greeting when I walk down the ramp of the Regulus drop ship that ferried me down to New Svalbard’s airfield. The weather has gotten a lot worse in the week I was gone. The snowdrifts by the sides of the squat hangars nearby are four or five meters high, and there’s a sixty-knot polar wind blowing across the open space and whipping the snow sideways. Sergeant Fallon is in her battle armor, which is ice-caked, and she only raises her visor briefly when she walks up to me to help me with my gear.
“That’s some grade-A shit weather,” I say to her. “Shuttle got delayed three hours waiting for a break in the storm.”
“This isn’t a storm,” she says. “This is fucking balmy. You can actually see ahead for more than ten meters. Everything has moved underground. And I mean everything. The whole town. Did you know they have a whole damn recreation district underground?”
“No, I did not know that.”
“They call it the Ellipse. Come on, stow your new toys, and I’ll take you down to the bar. They have a thing called a Shockfrost cocktail. I don’t know what’s in it, but it will make you think you can arm-wrestle a Lanky.”
The Ellipse is an underground concourse that makes a loop underneath a large chunk of New Svalbard. Sergeant Fallon leads me around like a tour guide. All the bunker-like houses on the surface have secondary subterranean exits that lead to neighborhood tunnels, and all of those tunnels converge on the Ellipse. In the winter months, when nobody can spend much time on the surface in hundred-knot polar winds, life moves underground on New Svalbard.