She closes her eyes and tilts her head back.
“My little brother was on one of the ships in the counterattack. I told them it was no good. Told them they’d be running themselves against a wall for nothing. They went anyway because they had to. And my brother didn’t come back.”
I don’t say anything, and the silence between us stretches out for a few moments.
“I would have turned the ship around if I had been able to fight with them. But I had four hundred crew left who didn’t need to die for nothing. So we went home, and instead of coming home with Darius, I got to give my father a flag folded into a triangle. We didn’t even have a burial capsule to drape it over, because his ship was lost with all hands above Mars. So don’t tell me I don’t know what it cost you. We all paid dearly. Those who left, and those who didn’t.”
“I wouldn’t have left with them,” I say. “I wouldn’t have left everyone behind.”
“You say that now,” she says, and looks at me evenly, without anger. “Your wife is in the fleet. My parents and my kids were not. They let me take my kids, but not my mom and dad. I left my parents behind to save my kids.”
I don’t have a snappy response for that, so I just look at the field of stars above our heads. I try to imagine what I would do if I had to make a choice between Halley or Mom, choose one of them to come to safety with me and leave the other one to near-certain death.
Colonel Yamin takes a slow, long breath, exhales, and gets out of her chair. Then she tugs on the front of her uniform to smooth it out.
“I should get back to CIC and leave you to your business. As you were.”
She walks over to the ladder well and swings one foot over the threshold.
“Don’t be so sure of your judgment. You ran, we stayed, you’re wrong, we’re right. I hope you never have to make that kind of choice. But if you ever do, maybe you’ll remember this. Nobody’s ever the bad guy in their own mind, Lieutenant. Sometimes you just have to pick between two bad choices and decide which one is a little less awful than the other. The one that’ll let you sleep a tiny bit better at night.”
She nods at me and starts her climb back into Phalanx’s hull, leaving me alone with my thoughts underneath the star-studded blackness of space.
CHAPTER 10
FLEET ASSEMBLY POINT ECHO
Phalanx leaves the dock at Gateway precisely at 0700 hours on Monday morning. It’s November, and I don’t know whether it’s overcast down in Liberty Falls right now, but it feels overcast here in this ship even though there’s nothing but black above and behind us. I got out of my bunk at the last watch change an hour ago, and I’m returning from the officer mess and a sparse meal of scrambled eggs and coffee when the overhead announcement system trills.
“All hands, this is Colonel Yamin. I just gave the order to clear the docking collar and secure all airlocks. In a few minutes, we will disconnect the service umbilicals and cut loose from Gateway for our run to the fleet assembly area.”
Phalanx’s commander pauses for a few seconds before she continues her address.
“You all know what we are about to do, and where we are about to go. I’ve ordered the CIC watch to put the video feed from Phalanx’s main camera array onto every viewscreen on the ship. Take a moment, and look at the feed if you can.”
I turn on the little viewscreen in my stateroom. It shows a slice of Earth below Phalanx and Gateway in ultrahigh resolution. Most of the continent below us is covered in clouds, but I can make out part of the North American coastline, the familiar shape of the northern East Coast. It’s a perfect shot if you wanted to include a promo image of Earth in some sort of intergalactic travel guide—the blue-and-white planet, teeming with life and activity, and the thin sliver of atmosphere separating all that life from the vastness of space. You only realize how thin that atmospheric layer really is once you get to see it from this vantage point. The horizon in the distance goes from white to light blue, then to star-studded dark blue in the space of just a few degrees of view angle. My physics teacher used to say that the atmospheric layer is as thin as the condensation on the peel of an orange when you breathe on it. Even the moon is cooperating for the beauty shot—it’s up above the horizon just above the atmospheric transition layer, so close and clear that I can make out the network of structures on Luna City and its surroundings.
“This is what we are going to defend,” Phalanx’s commander continues. “This is where we started crawling out of the mud a hundred millennia ago. This is where we built our cities and made our histories. This is where our friends and families are, everything we hold dear. This is what’s going to be taken from us if we don’t beat the Lankies back here and now. We stand and fight, or we fade into the black forever.”
I look at the slice of Earth visible on the camera feed, so vast when you’re this close to it, and yet so small when you consider how much nothingness is all around us just in the solar system, never mind the rest of the universe. On a cosmic scale, our species and its history are utterly irrelevant, probably just one sentient life-form among millions. But I’m not ready to let it all disappear into the void just yet.
“So we stand, and so we fight,” the skipper says. “Stand to and man your posts. We will return when we’ve done our jobs, and that little blue orb will still be home. I’ll be damned if I let those bastards kick us off. All hands, prepare for departure.”
The announcement ends, and I am left to think about the skipper’s words as I sit alone in my stateroom, looking at the screen in front of me, where Earth keeps on rotating slowly in space. I’ve left Gateway on combat deployments so many times that I thought I was inoculated against the feeling I have right now, the premonition that I’m seeing my home planet for the last time. I see myself on the surface of Mars again, thousands of Lankies in front of me, and then nuclear fireballs, a dream that may be on the way to becoming reality.
Half an hour later, as we coast away from Gateway at the low speed prescribed for orbital maneuvers, the skipper’s voice comes over the 1MC again. I look up from my PDP and the message I am typing out to Halley.