Lines of Departure by Marko Kloos
For Lyra and Quinn. No matter how many novels I write, you two will always be my biggest accomplishment.
Sometimes, the old sergeants talk about the Good Old Days.
There once was a blessed and mythical time when military service was a desirable job—a ticket to a low-risk career, access to decent food, and tolerable benefits. The military was selective, but when you got in, you were a member of a privileged class for the rest of your life.
Naturally, the Good Old Days came to an end about ten minutes after I signed my enlistment papers.
We’ve been fighting a new enemy for almost five years now, and we can’t even agree on a name for them. The xenobiologists came up with an unpronounceable Latin designation that nobody uses outside of a textbook. The infantry grunts, known for prosaicness, call them Lankies or Big Uglies. The Sino-Russians didn’t even have a name for them for the first year of the war, because they believed the North American Commonwealth was spinning tall tales to cover up terraforming disasters or natural calamities on the colonies we lost one by one.
Then the Lankies took SRA-settled Novaya Rossiya, just past the Thirty. One hundred thirty thousand dead colonists later, their scientists finally started to compare notes with ours.
These aliens are eighty feet tall and incredibly thick-skinned, and they roam around in groups. It takes heavy antiarmor munitions to put a dent in a Lanky, and their mile-high terraforming structures won’t budge for anything less than a ten-kiloton tactical nuke. The only way to scrape them off a colony planet is to glass all their atmo exchangers and settlements with a few hundred megatons from orbit, and that sort of treatment makes the place unfit for human resettlement. Once the Lanky seed ships enter the orbit of a colony, that place is no longer ours, one way or the other. To us, it may be a war—to them, it’s just pest control.
When I joined the military, humanity had a few hundred colonies between the SRA and the NAC, from the old settlement on Luna to the newly terraformed New Caledonia just short of the seventy-light-year line. Then the Lankies appeared and kicked us off a colony planet called Willoughby, and five years later we don’t have a single colony left beyond the thirty-light-year line that used to mark the boundary between the inner and outer colonies.
We’re down to sixty-nine colonies, and the number drops by a dozen or more every year. The Lankies show up, exterminate the big settlements, tear down our expensive terraforming stations, raise a fully functioning, superefficient terraforming network in less time than it takes us to send reinforcements through the nearest Alcubierre chute, and make the place their own. Once they’re in orbit, our people on the ground can only scatter and wait for the navy’s evac force to show up, because there’s not a damn thing the garrison marines can do against the Lankies.
When I was a kid, I used to watch the corny military adventure vids on the Networks. I remember the more optimistic ones, where Earth gets invaded by some species even more violent and territorial than our own, and the nations of Earth forget their old differences and stand shoulder to shoulder against the outside threat.
In reality, not even the threat of alien invasion of their colonies could keep the SRA from messing with us and sneaking around behind our backs to take advantage of the fact that three-quarters of our military strength was suddenly diverted to hold the line against the Lankies. On the fringes, we had to dig in to defend our colonies, using garrison battalions and regiments where we had companies and platoons before. On the inner colonies, we suddenly had to deal with increasingly bold SRA raids again, having to pry the Sino-Russians off of colonies that had been secure NAC property for over fifty years.
All in all, the last five years have been anything but low-risk for people in uniform.