It feels strange to board a drop ship at a stroll, without the haste and urgency of an impending combat drop. When the call to board craft comes, I line up on the flight deck with the headquarters platoon of the 330th, and trudge aboard the assigned Wasp. We’re all in combat armor, and everyone is loaded down with weapons and personal gear units, all our issued kit in a tough, wheeled polyplast container with a DNA lock.
I claim a seat and buckle in. As I fumble with the lock on the old-style seat harness, someone else drops into the seat next to mine with a grunt. I look over and see Sergeant Fallon’s face.
“Ready for a dirtside vacation, Andrew?”
“Hey, Sarge. I didn’t know you were in the HQ platoon.”
“I’m not.” She winks at me. “Actually, I’m the NCOIC for Delta Company. Don’t tell anyone, though.”
She puts her rifle into the storage bracket next to her seat, and engages the lock.
“We did a little rearranging, you see. The staff platoon is going to Camp Frostbite, not the terraforming stations. We stacked the deck a little bit, to make sure all the aces end up in the right spot. You never know what’s going to happen, right?”
“That’s the damn truth,” I say.
Camp Frostbite is a cluster of ferroconcrete domes hugging a hillside. It’s next to the main terraforming hub on New Svalbard, right in the center of the habitable tundra belt carved out along the equator by a few decades of relentless terraforming. Of course, “habitable” on New Svalbard only means “not instantly fatal to exposed personnel.” When the ramp of our drop ship lowers onto the flight pad of Camp Frostbite’s airfield, a polar gale sweeps through the cargo hold instantly, a chilly welcome to one of the most inhospitable places humanity has ever settled. To a man and woman, all the troopers in the hold lower the visors on their helmets.
There’s no welcoming committee on the windswept landing pad. I step out onto the concrete, which to my surprise is not covered in snow like on my previous visits to New Svalbard. Behind me, Sergeant Fallon stops at the bottom of the ramp, and then takes a slow and deliberate step onto the tarmac. She scrapes the surface of the concrete with the toe of her boot a few times and walks over to where I’m standing.
“First steps on a different world,” she says to me over private suit-to-suit comms. “Doesn’t really feel any different from Earth. I’m a little underwhelmed.”
“We pick them for easy access to minerals or water,” I say. “Pretty isn’t very high up on the list. Most of the colonies are pretty rough.”
“Well, at least the air’s clean. Great view, too.”
Sergeant Fallon turns in a circle to take in the scenery all around the base. The town in the valley below is the only evidence of a human presence in sight. Behind us, there’s a chain of snow-covered mountains rising into the steel-gray sky, and beyond the town there’s a vast expanse of tundra and glaciers, devoid of any trace of life.
“Hardly any people,” Sergeant Fallon says. “Beats a metroplex all to hell, it does. Crank up the thermostat a couple dozen degrees, and it’d be damn near paradise.”
Camp Frostbite has expanded since I was last down here for a water stop. Before, there were enough buildings to house a reinforced company and a platoon or two of vehicles. Now the number of structures has more than doubled. There are four company buildings, a new mess hall and rec facility, and a much bigger vehicle hangar. As we walk through the flight facility on our way to the company quarters, I notice that the local garrison now has its own flight of drop ships. Four brand-new Dragonflies are neatly parked inside the heated and spotless aircraft hangar. What used to be a grungy little outpost with the barest set of amenities has grown into a proper military base.
“We’re in Building Two, along with the 309th’s staff platoon. Enlisted on the second and third floors, noncoms on the fourth floor,” the platoon sergeant says when we file into the central courtyard with all our gear. “The fleet guys are already here, so don’t be stepping on any toes. They’re over in Building Three.”
The new company buildings are squat, loaf-shaped structures with rounded corners and thick walls, looking more like bunkers than living quarters. The four of them are all lined up in a row on one side of the main road that bisects Camp Frostbite. With the garrison company in Building One, and a company of the Midway’s SI regiment in Building Three, the two staff platoons of the Homeworld Defense battalions are neatly corralled between superior numbers of Spaceborne Infantry troops.