“Long fucking day,” she says to me, and puts her feet up on the crate that serves as a table. “I don’t know how you fleet pukes can stand it, spending months in these coffins. I’ve only been walking around in here for a day and a half, and I’m already getting claustrophobic.”
“It helps to remind yourself just how much room there is on the other side of that hull,” I say. “Think of it as cozy. Just be glad you’re on a carrier. Lots of legroom. Frigate’s about a twentieth of the tonnage.”
“This is what you’ve been doing the last five years? Sitting around in one of these tin cans?”
“Well, that, and taking it to the Lankies. Tell you what, those SRA marines aren’t half bad when your other option is fighting something that’s eighty feet tall and bulletproof.”
“Did they tell you where we’re going?”
I shake my head. “Not a clue. They dragged this old thing out of mothballs and rushed us out the door, and that’s all I know. That was the fastest pre-deployment prep I’ve ever seen.”
“You know how they got us ground pounders ready for this shit?” Sergeant Fallon asks. “Six days at Camp Jarhead, with a bunch of SI instructors. Six days! And half those space monkeys didn’t know their ass from a hole in the ground. If those guys are supposed to be our first line of defense up here, we must be good and fucked.”
“Six days,” I repeat in disbelief. SI combat school for infantry soldiers takes three months, half of which are spent in zero-g and hostile environment training at Camp Gray on Luna. Six days are barely enough to get people used to moving in low gravity without killing themselves.
“Yeah,” Sergeant Fallon says. “And no new gear, either. They showed us how to fire those M-80s and the crew-served autocannons, but they didn’t issue us any. What the fuck are we going to do with our popguns up here?”
I don’t have a good answer for her, so I just shake my head in commiseration. With two battalions of Earthside grunts lacking anti-Lanky weaponry, our still-secret destination has got to be an SRA colony planet; otherwise those fifteen hundred Homeworld Defense troopers are just very inefficient ballast.
“A squad can take a Lanky with those popguns,” I say. “You just have to get the drop on it and blow your whole ammo load, and even then it’s a shaky thing. Also, they run in groups, just like we do.”
“Awesome,” one of the other troopers says, and the others start an unhappy little chorus of murmurs.
“Doesn’t matter,” Sergeant Fallon says. “If we get to go up against those things, we’re all fucked anyway, cruising around in this museum exhibit. But I doubt that’s why we’re up here.”
She looks at me for a moment, biting on her lower lip slightly as if she’s appraising me.
“You keeping up with the news from Earthside, Grayson?”
“Not really,” I say. “Don’t have much time to watch the Networks. Whatever we get is canned shit anyway. MilNet’s just boring shit, unit news and feel-good crap.”
“They’re keeping the lid on tight,” Sergeant Fallon says. “Color me shocked.”
“You suggesting that Fleet Command sanitizes our news?” I ask with mock incredulity. Several of the troopers chuckle, but Sergeant Fallon does not even smile at my joke. Instead, she looks around again, and then leans across the table, propping her elbows on the scuffed olive-green polyplast of the crate.
“You remember Detroit, right? The night we lost two drop ships and a bunch of troops?”
I lightly touch the side of my tunic, placing two fingers onto the spot where some welfare rioter with a stolen rifle put two fléchette rounds into me, piercing one lung and a few yards of intestine.
“Yeah, I remember Detroit,” I say. “Wish I didn’t.”
“Well, five years ago, that was an emergency. These days, it’s the rule. The PRCs have their own militias now, and they own the ground. Most of the big cities, the cops don’t even go in anymore, ’cause the welfare rats have better hardware. All our calls are ‘weapons free’ from the start now.”
“You have got to be kidding.”
“Wish I wasn’t,” she says, precisely aping the tone of my own remark. “You people up here, you’re at war with the Sino-Russkies and the Lankies. Down Earthside, we’re at war with our own people, Grayson.”
“All the PRCs? That’s, what, half a billion people? Shit, BosProv has twenty million all by itself. There’s no way they can keep a lid on all of those.”
“We’re not,” Sergeant Fallon says. “We’re barely holding the line. We let them kill each other all they want, let them run their own shows in the PRCs. We only come out of our forts to break kneecaps whenever the sewage starts spilling out into the ’burbs, and they torch a few middle-class citizens in their hydrocars and their air-conditioned crackerbox houses. If it’s just two groups of welfare rats shooting it out, nobody gives a shit anymore.”
“And they can afford to send two full battalions up here to help us out?”
“Ah.” Sergeant Fallon smiles without humor. “And now we get to the heart of the matter.”