We drag our gear up to Building Two, find some rooms, and stash our stuff in the new berth lockers we find. Once again, I get to claim a room of my own, continuing a chain of luck unbroken since I got back into the fleet after Combat Controller School. I transfer my gear and battle armor into the locker, take out my PDP, and check for local network access. Whoever did the upgrades to Camp Frostbite didn’t forget the data infrastructure, because I’m on the local MilNet node instantly, without the transmission lag typical to most backwater colonies.
I check my message inbox for incoming traffic, hoping against my better knowledge that Halley managed to dash out a reply before the Midway did her last pre-transition database synchronization. All the new messages I’ve received are just administrative garbage from the fleet, of course. If I left the solar system for the last time when we transitioned out, then the common history I share with Halley will have no final period, no formal epilogue.
I don’t want to dwell on things that are outside of my control, so I stow my PDP and leave the room to do the sensible and soldierly thing—I head for the chow hall to check the quality of the local food.
The day on New Svalbard is over a hundred hours long, but most of us have lived in windowless tubes on six-hour watch cycles for so long that we don’t need a daylight transition to be able to sleep. I spend the next two watch cycles sleeping, eating, and getting settled in my new environment. It’s the middle of summer on New Svalbard right now, which means that we can walk around outside in our regular fatigues without turning into expressionist ice sculptures within a few minutes. The road from the main gate of the base down to the town has been upgraded from dirt to a high-traction hardpack mix, and the town itself has grown so much closer to the base that walking down to the base seems feasible now.
“You can walk it,” the gate guard says, guessing my thoughts as I stand and survey the tundra. “It’s a kilometer and a half. We do it all the time when the weather’s good. Just don’t try it when we have winter gales blowing, ’less you’re in heated armor.”
“Anything down there worth the hike?”
“They got some bars in town. The new rec building here on base is nicer than anything the civvies have, but sometimes you want to see people who aren’t wearing uniforms, you know?”
“Yeah,” I say. The gate guard nods and returns to his duties, scanning the screens in the gate booth for sensor alarms.
I walk past the gate and down the hardpack surface of the road for a little while, until I’m out of earshot of the gate booth. There’s a breeze coming from the north, where snowcapped mountains form a ragged wall on the horizon. It’s cold enough that I wouldn’t want to spend an hour out here in just my battle dress, but for the moment, I don’t mind the cold. Most of the time, I breathe the scrubbed air on spaceships, and whenever I drop onto the surface of a colony planet, I’m usually too busy with staying alive and killing things to stop and appreciate the clean planetary atmosphere. New Svalbard is harsh, cold, and barren, but there’s a clean purity about it that is breathtaking to someone who grew up in a Public Residence Cluster, where a single tenement building has more people in it than the entire population of the little town in the valley below the base. I wish I could record some vid footage for Mom. In all my years on Earth, I’ve never been anywhere you can see for twenty miles in any direction and not spot another human being.
Ten more years of terraforming, and this place will be pretty, I think. And then the SRA will try to take it from us, once we’ve done all the hard work for them, and we’ll turn this little moon into a battlefield. If the Lankies don’t come in and grab it for themselves long before then.
Overhead, two drop ships come swooping out of the overcast sky. They keep their tight formation as they make a pass over Camp Frostbite, navigation lights blinking. Their wing pylons are crammed with cargo pods. The Midway’s drop-ship wing has been shuttling people and gear from ship to surface for the last two watch cycles, a steady flow of traffic between the carrier and the outposts. In less than twelve hours, the number of Commonwealth troops on the ground has increased tenfold. The two HD battalions spread out among the terraforming stations don’t have any organic air support or heavy armor, but even so, the SRA would find this place a tough nut to crack for anything less than a brigade. To the Lankies, our presence wouldn’t matter—just a few more anthills to kick over.
I want to walk around on the cold tundra some more, enjoy this rare solitude and the wide-open spaces around Camp Frostbite, but then the speakers of the base announcement system come to life and disturb the tranquility of the scene.
“All off-duty personnel, report to mess hall at 1600 hours for a briefing. Repeat, all off-duty personnel report to the mess hall at 1600.”
I check my watch to find that I have fifteen minutes left, so I make my way back to the gate reluctantly.