“How’s Maksim?” I ask. Dmitry smiles again, clearly pleased that I remembered the name of his spouse.
“Still big. Little less dumb. Maybe you will meet him on Mars. Eight hundred seventy-sixth Desant Battalion, on carrier Rossiya.” I see the shadow of a sorrowful frown on his face as he mentions the unit of his husband, and I know exactly what he’s feeling right now. Both our spouses are riding out to this battle as well, but in different units and embarked on different ships, and barring an extremely unlikely coincidence, our paths on the battlefield won’t cross. We will see them after the battle, or never again.
“You ever drop in an NAC bio-pod before?”
“Yes,” Dmitry says. “In simulator. Is not so hard. Pod does all the flying. You are just bullet in big gun.”
“That’s pretty much it in a nutshell,” I say, and look over my shoulder at the rest of the troopers in the common space. The berthing module is designed to hold a whole platoon, forty personnel, and we’re not even half that number.
“Three fire teams, a pair of combat controllers, and a medic,” I say. “That better be a really small LZ, or we’ll be stretched mighty thin.”
The hatch of the berthing module opens, and I look to see who’s arriving. For just a moment, I have the wild, irrational hope that Halley is going to walk into the room unexpectedly, just like she did on Portsmouth. But the newcomer isn’t my wife. It’s a soldier in Eurocorps camo, and he has a fleet sergeant in tow. The Eurocorps trooper is a wiry guy with an ultrashort buzz cut. He wears a blue Euro flag on one sleeve, the black-red-gold German flag on the other, and lieutenant-rank insignia on the front of his camo tunic.
“Sirs,” the fleet sergeant behind him says. “This is Lieutenant Stahl. He’s this ship’s Eurocorps liaison.”
“Germans, Russians, North Americans,” I say to the table in a low voice. “It’s like a little United Nations in here all of a sudden.”
“Not like United Nations,” Dmitry says. “We are not, how do you say, debate club? We are better at shooting things a lot, I think.”
“That’s the only thing we’re good at,” I correct.
There aren’t many private spots on a warship, not even one the size of Phalanx, but after a few years in the fleet, you figure out where the quiet corners on each type of ship are located. Phalanx is a Hammerhead cruiser, halfway between a destroyer and an assault carrier in size, and she has a little astrogation deck in her dorsal hull, a small polyplast bubble on top of the armor, accessible through a narrow ladder. It’s a long climb through two decks’ worth of laminate armor plating, so it’s not occupied very often. But when I go up there to compose a few messages to Halley and my mother while looking at the stars, there’s someone else sitting in one of the observation chairs already.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” I say when I see the rank insignia on the sleeves of the occupant’s uniform. “I didn’t know you were up here.”
Colonel Yamin, Phalanx’s commanding officer, nods at the row of empty chairs in front of her.
“No intrusion, Lieutenant. This is a crew space, after all. Come and sit. I was just about to leave anyway.”
I finish climbing out of the ladder well and walk over to one of the chairs to sit down.
So far, I’ve only known the skipper as a disembodied voice on the 1MC. The woman in the standard Fleet uniform sitting in the chair across from mine has long dark hair, green eyes, and a vaguely sad and pensive air about her. She reminds me a little bit of Halley, only with another ten years of combat and hard choices etched into her face.
“You’re one of the SOCOM guys,” she says.
“Yes, ma’am. Combat controller. First ones down, last ones up.”
She looks at the ring on my right hand and nods toward it. “Podhead’s not a great job for a married man.”
“She doesn’t mind. She’s a drop-ship jock. At least we both have our asses on the line at the same time.”
“How long have you been doing this?”
“Five years in this specialty. Married for a little over a year. We got married on Regulus right before the Lanky incursion last year.” I smile at the memory. “She had the skipper marry us while the ship was in condition Zebra and getting ready for battle.”
“Sounds like she has her priorities straight,” Colonel Yamin says with a little smile.
I look at the stars outside the ten-meter polyplast bubble of the observatory. “I’ve been in the fleet almost seven years. I feel like I ought to be able to identify constellations by sight. But I still can’t tell most of them apart.”
“They drill that into you in cap-ship officer school,” Colonel Yamin says. “Like we’re ever going to stand up here with a sextant and navigate a thirty-thousand-ton cruiser by eyeballs.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not even a real officer. Limited duty. Got promoted last year, right before the Leonidas mission.”
I remember half a second too late that Phalanx was one of the ships stolen by the renegade NAC government, part of the fleet reclaimed by nuclear blackmail.
“How long have you had Phalanx?” I ask.
“Two and a half years. I took command six months before the Lankies kicked us off Mars.” She gives me a sad little smile. “Yes, Lieutenant, I am one of those people. The ones who tucked tail and ran.”
“I’m sure you had your reasons, ma’am,” I say, careful to sound neutral. A little over a month ago, this woman was with the group that tried to kill us while we tried to kill them right back. All the ship commanders are still in charge of their units, but the ones who went with the renegade government have suspicious eyes on them at all times, and there’s still talk about a court-martial for them after Mars if any make it back alive.
“Everyone has reasons for what they do,” she replies. “Sometimes they’re even good ones. If there’s one thing I learned from it all, it’s that I am in no position to judge someone else’s.”
“We fought,” I say. “When you were all gone, and the Lankies came calling. We fought with what you left us. Frigates, corvettes, all the old shit you didn’t take. We stopped them, but you have no idea what it cost us.”
She looks at me, and I can see anger welling up behind those green eyes. Then she sighs and shakes her head slightly. “When the Lankies took Mars, we were docked in orbit,” she says. “Getting ready to make the run back to Earth, for refits and crew R & R. Half the crew was planetside. My XO got killed on the surface, rescuing settlers. I sent this ship out to save shuttles and lifeboats. Lots of lifeboats. We gave them everything we had, which is a lot. You know the firepower of a Hammerhead. They shrugged it off like we were throwing pebbles.”
She speaks softly, recounting her memories as if retelling a dream.
“Of the crew I had left, I lost two hundred when the Lankies hit us. We patched her up and limped back to Earth. The ship was unable to fight, barely able to run. And then we passed the counterattack going the other way.”