I don’t have much to do except to stow my kit and exercise, so I spend most of my time on the flight deck, working out while keeping an eye on the shuttles that are delivering personnel and gear every few minutes.
The HD troops start arriving in force in the afternoon. The docking clamps haul up shuttle after shuttle loaded with troopers in battle armor, hauling gear bags. From the other side of the hangar deck, I can’t make out individual faces, and all the HD grunts look alike in their bulky armor suits, but when Sergeant Fallon’s shuttle arrives, I have no trouble making her out in the crowd. Shortly before the late afternoon watch change, the docking arm deposits a weather-beaten fleet shuttle on the deck, the main hatch opens, and a group of HD troopers step out on the flight deck as if they are deploying in the middle of a hostile city. They have their rifles slung across their chests, and there are no magazines in their weapons, but the disembarking HD troopers still radiate a tense readiness.
I recognize Sergeant Fallon instantly. She walks down the ramp with the efficiency of movement I remember well. There’s nothing casual about her stride. She walks onto the Midway’s flight deck like a predator checking out a new environment. I know that her left leg underneath the battle armor is titanium alloy and nanocarbon fibers instead of flesh and bone, but there’s no way to deduce it from her gait. As she steps off the ramp and toward her unit’s assembly area on the other side of the black-and-yellow safety line, there’s a phalanx of her troopers around her—not bodyguards, but limbs of the same belligerent organism, ready to strike out in any direction if needed.
I watch as her group gathers in a circle for a quick briefing and then moves over to their assigned area, where they start to make this unfamiliar territory their own, safety and comfort in numbers.
I haven’t seen Sergeant Fallon since I left the TA four and a half years ago, and we have only exchanged a few dozen MilNet messages since then. Still, the knowledge of her presence on board puts my mind at ease a little. As we prepare to leave Gateway for God knows where, doing God knows what, it’s comforting to know at least one other person on this ship. Having my old squad leader nearby makes me feel a little less alone in the universe right now.
CHAPTER 14
“Now hear this: All hands, prepare for departure. Repeat, all hands prepare for departure. Secure all docking collars.”
I’m back in the supply group picking up my new-issue gear when the departure alert comes over the 1MC. With all the activity everywhere on the ship, it seems impossible that the Midway is already stocked and crewed for combat operations, but it looks like we’re off to war anyway.
“Already?” Sergeant Simer says, echoing my own thoughts. “Jeez. It’s like they’re pushing us out the door with our shoes untied.”
“And in our underwear,” I add. “No way this bucket is already in fighting shape.”
“You got quarters yet, Grayson?”
“Yeah, I grabbed a berth in NCO country. Weird—they’re stacking the grunts three high on the flight deck, and half the permanent berths on my deck are empty. I got a two-man berth all to myself. It’s like we’re running on a skeleton crew.”
“We are,” Simer says. “Sixty percent of normal, at best.”
“But we have three times as many grunts as a supercarrier. And most of them are garrison troops who have never been in space before.”
“We gotta feed all those mudlegs for a month, we’ll get to wherever we’re headed with empty food stores,” Simer says. “Hope it’s a fast trip to the chute.”
By now, everyone but the most oblivious private straight out of tech school has figured out that our upcoming deployment is going to be anything but a bread-and-butter task force cruise or planetary assault. They never inform the rank and file of the mission specifics until we are out of the Alcubierre chute in the destination system, so all we can do is speculate. Since we have three times our normal contingent of infantry, and not enough drop ships to land them all at once, the general consensus in the NCO mess is a garrison deployment, reinforcing some SI detachment on a backwater colony planet close to the Thirty. The presence of Homeworld Defense troops and the aged equipment of our hastily assembled battle group spawn other rumors, magnitudes wilder than the usual pre-deployment scuttlebutt: We’re evacuating Earth. We’re assaulting the Lanky homeworld with everything that can ride an Alcubierre chute. We secretly made peace with the SRA, and we’re going to help them fight off the Lankies on Novaya Kiev. We secretly surrendered to the SRA, and we’re delivering half the fleet’s tonnage for disarmament. Enlisted soldiers have active imaginations, unlike the brass at Joint Command, or the bureaucrats holding the reins back on Earth.
Whatever the rumors, however, the conclusions are similar in every mess hall and crew berth on the ship. This deployment will be a hasty clusterfuck of epic proportions, and at the end of the day, the grunts and pilots and wrench spinners will be left holding the bag.