My current ship is the NACS Intrepid, fleet carrier and one of three ships of the new Essex class. The Essex carriers are fast, well armed, and the last new hardware in the fleet for the foreseeable future. The ships were ordered before the war with the Lankies broke out, and they hurriedly specified some refits to accommodate the new tactical situation before the three ships of the class were even out of the construction dock. The navy had ordered seven more, ten ships in total to form the new backbone of the NAC carrier force, but then they ran out of money, so the three Essex carriers form a rather short backbone. They’re not nearly as big as the Navigator-class supercarriers that preceded them, but they’re faster and fitted with a better sensor suite, which has proven a bigger asset against the Lankies than sheer size or armor-belt thickness. The Essex carriers are always in demand, and always in the thick of things.
I like serving on a carrier, because the big bird farms have a lot more space than the little tin cans I usually pulled when I was still a Neural Networks administrator. As one of three combat controllers on the Intrepid, I get my own single-person berth, a luxury usually reserved for senior NCOs and staff officers. That means I get to vid-chat in private, without a bunch of my peers half-listening over my shoulder. Combat controllers are always in demand as well, since there are so few of us, and we get certain privileges above our rank and pay grade. The entire fleet only has two hundred of us, so we never have much idle time.
Since graduating from the pipeline and putting on the scarlet beret, I’ve been hopping from one star system to the next, fighting the SRA one month and the Lankies the next. If the fleet paid a cent for every million miles traveled, I’d be the richest individual in the history of the planet. Because Fleet Arm ships need downtime for refits and rearming, I tend to hop ships every six months or so, because we combat controllers are too few to go around to have as much downtime as the hardware. Before the Intrepid, I was on the Atlas, the Tecumseh, the New Hampshire, and a half dozen other ships whose names I can’t even recall without consulting my personnel and transfer record.
In the end, it’s all the same business, anyway—launching from a carrier or cruiser with a stern-faced and tight-lipped unit of Commonwealth grunts, going into battle against Russians or Chinese or Lankies, and calling down the wrath of the gods on our enemies when needed. The grunts have rifles, rocket launchers, and tactical nuclear mortars. I have something much more fearsome than that—a set of radios that can talk to the attack ships of the task force in orbit, and a computer that can just about remote-control that task force.
When the grunts bump into a minor problem, they use their rifles and rockets. For bigger problems, they lob half-kiloton nukes. For really big problems, they call on me, and I direct in a wing of Shrikes loaded with ordnance, or an orbital fifty-megaton strike that will turn an entire Lanky settlement into a few hundred square miles of abstract art rendered in glowing slag. One of my fellow combat controllers has the words Planetary Remodeling Kit written on the lid of his tactical control deck, and that joke is not too much of an exaggeration.
In between the hours and days of excitement, stress, and outright terror, however, there are days and weeks of boredom, thanks to the mechanics of interstellar travel. My next mission, a little less than eight days away, will be on a planet called New Wales, in orbit around the fourth planet of the Theta Persei system. The trip to the solar-system end of the Alcubierre chute to Theta Persei will take seven days, and the transition across the intervening thirty-seven light years only twelve hours.
Once we get there, we will do battle with the Lankies. I don’t know yet what’s waiting for us on New Wales, but a few factors have been a reliable constant for the last few years. We will be outgunned, outnumbered, and always just on the brink of utter defeat as we try to hold the line, try to keep our ever-contracting little bubble of colonized space from shrinking any further.
We’re the corps. This is what we do. The Commonwealth—humanity—is in deep shit, and we’re the people with the shovels. The trouble is that it’s a huge pile of shit, and they’re very small shovels.
CHAPTER 2