Task Force 230.7 is barely deserving of its name. The small group of mostly tired old hulls that transitions through the chute with us could probably defeat a single new destroyer, but I wouldn’t want to be part of the crew that tried it. There’s the eighty-year-old Midway, escorted by a light cruiser that’s almost as old, a frigate from another near-obsolete class, and a cargo ship from the auxiliary fleet. We have exactly one hull in our task force that’s younger than I am. However, that hull is the Indianapolis, and she’s just a lightly armed orbital-patrol craft barely big enough for a fusion plant and an Alcubierre drive. The only bright spot in the order of battle is the Portsmouth, one of the fleet’s fast and well-armed resupply ships.
Our misfit assembly of ill-matched ships pops out of Alcubierre after seven hours of transition. I’ve ridden the interstellar pathways of the fleet’s Alcubierre network hundreds of times, and while you can’t ever deduce your destination before the transition—the fleet ships vary their speeds and never go a direct course to the outbound chutes—you can tell the distance traveled by the time spent in transition, because ships can’t dogleg or vary their speed in the bubble. Seven hours puts us close to the Thirty, and I pull out my PDP to check the star charts for possible candidates at that distance, but the CIC saves me the work with an all-ship announcement.
“All hands, stand down from transition stations. Welcome to Fomalhaut.”
Fomalhaut, I think. A huge system that’s mostly hostile to human life. If they wanted to ship us off to an interstellar gulag, they picked just about the perfect spot.
Four hours after our transition into the Fomalhaut system, Captain Michaelson summons the SpecOps company for a briefing. When I walk into the makeshift ready room, there are maybe four squads’ worth of troopers sitting on the hastily arranged folding chairs. Captain Michaelson is at the front of the room, leaning on the briefing lectern.
“This is not a mission briefing,” he says when everyone has settled in. “It’s just a status update from upstairs. Don’t worry about taking notes.”
I do a quick headcount and beret-color survey in the room. There are thirty SI troopers, most with recon patches on their sleeves. Three fleet guys are sitting in a group in the front row, and on the other side of the room, there’s another trooper with the red beret of the combat controller fraternity. Captain Michaelson surveys the assembly and shakes his head, clearly irritated.
“I’m supposed to have a reinforced company sitting in front of me right now. Instead, I get one understrength recon platoon, three Spaceborne Rescue guys, and two combat controllers. I seem to be short my SEAL team and an entire recon platoon.”
“What a shock,” one of the recon guys in my row murmurs.
“But whatever,” the captain continues. “I guess I should be glad I’m not standing here by myself and briefing the wall over there, the way things have been going.”
He turns on the briefing screen on the wall behind him.
“Let’s make this one quick and easy. Anyone in this room who hasn’t been to lovely Fomalhaut yet?”
A few of the SI troopers raise their hands, rather sheepishly.
“Good. The rest of you are repeat customers, then.”
He brings up a strategic chart of the system, a bright Type-A star with a massive debris disk around it, and three planets orbiting somewhat forlornly in the space between.
“Let me do the quick tour for you new people,” Captain Michaelson says. “Fomalhaut is the low-rent district of the galaxy, as far as cosmic neighborhoods go. It’s big and cold and empty, and there aren’t a whole lot of decent places to pitch a tent out here.”
He picks one of the orbiting planets and zooms in on it.
“None of the planets here are terraformable. Fomalhaut is too close to the parent star, and gets cooked with radiation. Fomalhaut b is a Jovian gas giant. Fomalhaut d is a frozen ball of gas way beyond the debris disk. The only real estate we could get livable in this system are two moons—one around Fomalhaut b, and one around Fomalhaut c. One belongs to us, and the other to the SRA. Guess who got the more hospitable patch of ground in this system.”
As he talks, he isolates the planet’s moon on the display and zooms the perspective until the dirty-looking little sphere takes up most of the screen.
“That would be New Svalbard. It’s our watering hole here in Fomalhaut, but it ain’t much else. Hope you all packed your warm undies, because we’re going to beef up the garrison down there for a while.”
There’s an upswell of unhappy murmuring in the room. One of the Spaceborne Rescue sergeants raises his hand.