He looks at me for a moment, still smiling. “I suppose I can’t blame you.”
He picks up his data pad again and taps the screen a few times. “We’re going to Mars. That’s no big secret. And SOCOM will be first in the dirt, as usual. That’s about all. The details are just garnish at this point, aren’t they?”
“Yes, sir. But they’re still nice to know.”
A month and a half ago, when he stepped off the drop ship after the surrender of the renegade colony at Arcadia, I could have shot this stocky little bastard on the spot. He used my platoon as bait to lead the garrison on a wild-goose chase while his SEAL teams stuck nuclear demolition charges to half the terraformers on that moon. In the time since the mission, I’ve had enough time to reflect and realize that he did the absolute best with what he had, and that our final body count was an exceedingly cheap price to pay for what we got out of the mission. But I’ll never forget the fact that he used my troops as a diversion without letting us in on the plan. Thirty dead, and if Halley hadn’t been exceedingly lucky, I would be a widower right now. Professionally, I have to admire this crafty, ruthless bastard. Personally, I can’t help but hate him.
“I’ll share what I can when we are under way,” Major Masoud says. “Phalanx is departing for the fleet assembly point in thirteen hours. I suggest you get settled and meet your teammates. Take care of any last-minute comms business. We’ll be cruising under EMCON once we’re under way.”
“Yes, sir.” I get up, salute, and turn to walk out of Major Masoud’s little office again.
“And Lieutenant?”
I turn around again. “Yes, sir?”
“It’s good to have you on the team. And I say that without reservation.”
“Thank you, sir,” I say, mildly surprised.
Joining a new command always reminds me a little bit of those awkward first days of class in a new school, when you have to get used to your environment and get a feel for the social flow of the place at the same time. But the Special Operations community was small enough even before we lost three-quarters of SOCOM, so I expect to see at least a few familiar faces on Phalanx, and I am not disappointed.
I step into the mission-personnel berth with my kit bag to one of the strangest sights I’ve seen on a fleet warship. The berthing area looks a lot like the module for my platoon on Portsmouth—four staterooms on either side of the entry hatch, a larger assembly space beyond, and group berths on the far side of that. In the assembly space, there’s enough room for four foldout tables and benches to form booths, and there are a dozen troops sitting at those tables and engrossed in conversation. Five of them are wearing the distinctive mottled camo pattern of SRA marines. The SRA trooper closest to the door has his back turned to me, but he turns around when the SI troopers on the other side of the table spot me and pause their conversation. Dmitry Chistyakov, senior sergeant of the SRA marines, raises a hand in a casual greeting, as if he had just spotted me across the room in a bar on New Svalbard.
“Andrew,” he says. “Is good to see you. Come and sit.” He nods at an empty section of bench across the table from him.
“Gentlemen,” I say to the NAC troopers at the table with Dmitry. They nod at me, and I slide into the booth next to them. One is an SI lieutenant, and the other is a fleet master sergeant. The lieutenant has the black beret of the SI’s Force Recon arm tucked underneath his rank sleeve, and the master sergeant is a Spaceborne Rescueman. All around us, the conversations in the room pick up again.
“Do you know this character?” the Force Recon lieutenant asks, and nods at Dmitry.
“You could say that,” I say. “We’ve dropped together, in Fomalhaut. He knows his stuff.”
Just a little over a year ago, it would have been almost unthinkable to see an SRA trooper on a Commonwealth warship in any place but the brig. Seeing not one, but five of them here in the troop berth without handcuffs or armed NAC guards standing next to them is still a crazy thing to see. And if it seems crazy to me, with all my exposure to the SRA troops during our joint mission in Fomalhaut, I can’t imagine just how bizarre the sight must be to the NAC troops who weren’t there with us.
“What’s the word from upstairs, Lieutenant?” the Spaceborne Rescueman asks.
“We’re going to war, I think,” I reply, and the other troops at the table chuckle. “Seriously, I haven’t heard much,” I tell the master sergeant. “Our CO isn’t the chatty type. We’re leaving for the assembly point in thirteen hours. That’s about all I know.”
The master sergeant looks around in the room and shrugs. “Doesn’t take much intel to figure out what we’re going to do,” he says. “Podheads, the lot of us.”
“First into the LZ,” I agree. “How long has it been since your last pod drop?”
“Year and a half, not counting training drops. You?”
“Same. It’s all been taxi rides ever since.” I look over at the SRA trooper sitting next to Dmitry, who follows the conversation with a politely neutral expression. “Who’s your colleague, Dmitry?”
Dmitry points at the trooper next to him. “Mládshiy Leytenánt Bondarenko,” he says. “Leader of Alliance reconnaissance squad. And at other table is Sergeant Gerasimov, Sergeant Dragomirova, and Mládshiy Serzhánt Anokhin.”
At the other table, the SRA troopers he names raise their hands in greeting one by one when they hear their names. Sergeant Dragomirova, who has long dark hair that’s tightly pulled back and secured in a ponytail, flicks a little salute with the cup in her hand. Then they resume their conversations with the NAC troops at their tables.
“Is good squad,” Dmitry says. “Good fighters. Have killed many Lankies together. I drop with them a few times before.”
Considering the newness of the situation, and the fact that until a year ago, we were still in a shooting war with the SRA, the atmosphere in the personnel berth is downright low-key. It helps that the berths and common areas of a warship aren’t terrifically spacious and don’t lend themselves to keeping one’s distance. And I do notice that the SRA troopers and their NAC counterparts sit across the tables from each other and don’t mingle on the same benches. But overall, the SI troopers seem to be rather laid-back about having their former enemies in their midst. With the assault against the Lankies imminent, it seems that old animosities aren’t all that important anymore. We will fight those things together, just like we did at Fomalhaut, and we will live or die together.
“You learn any Russian, Andrew?” Dmitry asks. “You have year to learn.”
“Da, nemnogo,” I reply. Yes, a little. Dmitry rewards this with a smile and a nod.
“You spend time well since last year,” he says. “No longer squishy around middle.”