I have talked to hundreds of fleet Medical Corps shrinks after combat missions. We get a psych eval every time we come back from a drop with casualties, to make sure nobody’s going to snap and shoot up a mess hall or eat a rifle round. The psych hacks always ask the same questions, so they can get the answers that will let them make check marks in the right places on their eval forms. A lot of them are concerned about survivor guilt—the notion that we combat grunts beat ourselves up mentally for having survived battles that claimed our friends and comrades by the job lot. It’s all a bunch of horseshit, as far as I’m concerned.
As we enter the chute, and the Alcubierre field around the ship makes every molecule in my body develop a low-level ache, the only guilt I feel is for being relieved at not being among the poor bastards on the ground, my comrades in arms who are now facing certain death at the hands of the Lankies. But I don’t feel any guilt for having escaped that fate, and I know that most of the troops we are leaving behind wouldn’t feel any guilt for surviving in my stead, either.
CHAPTER 12
If we were half as good at fighting Lankies as we are at wiping out each other, the fleet would assemble a huge task force and transition en masse to the Sirius A system, to kick the shit out of the Lankies and rescue all the troops we left behind. Instead, the only people jumping into instant action are the fleet’s pencil pushers.
All through our transition from the Alcubierre chute back to Earth, the fleet brass tie up all our comms bandwidth to hold video debriefings with the survivors of Task Force Seventy-Two. I talk to an endless procession of majors, colonels, and generals, with a smattering of NAC and DOD officials in civilian garb thrown into the mix for good measure, and I repeat the same narrative dozens of times. Since I am the only surviving combat controller of the entire two-regiment force on the ground, the data storage modules in my battle armor are of particular interest to the brass, and they send a fleet Intel captain with an MP escort to collect my armor for data retrieval, as if I’m dumb enough to accidentally overwrite my computer’s memory with streamed Network news, or broadcast all the recorded plot data to everyone on the Nassau.
After the third straight day of video debriefings, I do something I’ve never done before in my career—I duck out of duty by going to sick bay. It doesn’t take much to make the shrink put me on sedatives and sleeping pills, and I spend the last three days of our trip back to Earth pleasantly doped up on a semiprivate folding cot in Storage Locker 2204L.
“Now hear this: All hands, prepare for arrival at Independence Station. ETA one hundred and twenty minutes.”
“Independence Station?” Staff Sergeant West repeats. He looks at me with a raised eyebrow. “That’s the corporate civvie station. Wonder what’s wrong with old Gateway.”
“Beats me,” I say, and take another sip of my coffee. “Maybe it finally fell into the North Atlantic. Every time we get back there, it looks more run down.”
“You know the fleet. They’ll run it ’til it breaks, and then they put it back together with polyglue and run it some more.”
Sergeant West is one of the troopers who survived the demise of Banshee Two-Five with me. Over the last few days, we have spent a lot of time in the NCO galley, working through the events in the Sirius A system by talking about different things entirely, the roundabout combat-grunt way of dealing with mental trauma.
The change in routine, combined with the fact that our in-system comms have been restricted ever since we popped out of Alcubierre a week ago, seems like a harbinger of bad things to come. When I share that concern with Sergeant West, he just shrugs.
“You’ve been in long enough, Grayson. Never assume malice if you can explain it with lack of planning.”
When we finally dock with Independence Station, we are greeted by a welcoming committee of what looks like a company or two of Intel officers and military police. More ominously, there are also people in civilian garb among them, and I don’t have to look at them twice to know they’re NAC domestic security agents. We’re funneled into separate rooms and split up into ever-smaller groups, until I find myself sitting in a small fabric-walled office unit with a dour-looking Intel captain.
“Staff Sergeant Grayson,” he says, reading off the data pad in his hands. “Sorry about the Manitoba. I’m sure you’ve lost a lot of friends on that ship.”
I didn’t really have a lot of friends on the Manitoba yet, since I had just transferred onto her, but I nod anyway.
“That wasn’t the first ship you lost, I see. There was the Versailles back in 2113. Can’t get away from the Lankies, can you?”
“Not my doing, Captain. I’d gladly stay away from them if they’d let me.”
“Yeah, they’re getting annoying.” He flicks through the screen on his data pad with his forefinger. “You were on the surface when the seed ship arrived. Did you get the flash message traffic that ordered all ground units to stay put and go defensive?”
“I don’t recall that one, sir. Things were a bit hectic, you know, what with the nukes going off in high orbit.”