“All hands, check the viewscreens.”
Colonel Yamin says nothing else, and I look over at the screen in my stateroom again. The camera angle no longer shows Earth. It’s trained on the section of orbit between Gateway and Independence Stations. There is a lot of orbital traffic between us and there—civvie freighters, orbital shuttles, corvettes, and patrol boats from smaller countries. Every one of the dozens of ships in sight has its exterior lights on, and they’re all blinking in synchronicity, a coordinated farewell to the departing warships on the way into battle. I’ve been feeling glum all morning, but the sight of this unexpected gesture from the people who can’t go off to battle with us suddenly makes me feel glad to be up here. Billions of people on the planet and thousands of personnel here in orbit have no choice but to sit this fight out and wait anxiously to see if they get to live on. I get to have a hand in the outcome of the battle. As small as my contribution may be in the end, I get to add my weight to our side of the scale, and that’s more than almost everyone else gets.
>We are under way. See you at the assembly point. I love you.
I send the message off to Halley, taking the opportunity while we’re still in range of the relay on Gateway. Underway, ship-to-ship traffic will be limited to mission essentials, and the near-field comms only work between ships if they are within a few kilometers of each other.
Her reply comes back a few minutes later.
>Pollux is leaving the dock in 45 minutes. I love you too. See you when it’s over. Good hunting.
The screen in my stateroom reverts back to its normal condition, a display of general ship information—course, speed, position, ship-wide announcements. One quadrant of the screen is taken up by the feed from the tactical plot in CIC, a three-dimensional representation of the space around the ship. I reach over and flick the tactical display so it takes up the entire screen. Gateway is already a few thousand kilometers behind us as Phalanx is accelerating to full military power and pulling away from the anchorage. We are part of a long line of blue and green lozenge-shaped icons, each representing an NAC or allied ship, each labeled with hull number and name. We’re not even at the fleet assembly point yet, but the space around Phalanx already contains more warships than I’ve seen in one spot since the run back from Fomalhaut. There’s something exhilarating about seeing that much combat power in motion, for once tackling the threat with a plan and a realistic chance instead of just throwing hardware against a wall to see it shatter.
When forty-five minutes since my exchange with Halley have passed, I check the display again for her ship, NACS Pollux, but we are too far ahead in the queue by now, and the awareness bubble of the CIC’s situational display isn’t large enough to track the carrier. Still, I know that she’s behind me somewhere, a few thousand kilometers astern from Phalanx and heading the same way.
We spend the day squaring away kit and eating meals in our respective facilities—the mess hall for the enlisted, and the officer wardroom for the junior officers among us: Lieutenant Bondarenko from the SRA marines, Lieutenant Perkins of the SI’s Force Recon team, Lieutenant Stahl from Eurocorps, and me. All the officers on the embarked SOCOM team are from different service arms and wearing four different camo patterns. When dinnertime comes around and we still don’t have orders or a schedule from our commanding officers, we all end up around the same table in the officer wardroom for lack of something else to do.
Lieutenant Bondarenko isn’t as gregarious as Dmitry, and his English isn’t half as good, so he stays mostly quiet, but he seems to like the officer chow just fine because he finishes off two plates. Lieutenant Perkins from SI is a year younger than I am but has almost as many combat drops and the typical cocky Force Recon devil-may-care attitude. The Eurocorps lieutenant is fluent in English but speaks with a heavy German accent. We exchange pleasantries and speculate about the upcoming landing on Mars.
“It’ll be the largest spaceborne assault in history,” Lieutenant Perkins says. “I’ve heard we’re dropping a whole division in the first wave, another with the second.”
“You think we scraped together enough troops for several divisions?” I say.
“You don’t think so?”
“I’ve done nothing but run boot-camp cycles for the last year to fill the roster. Two whole divisions? That’s four brigades. Sixteen battalions. Before we lost Mars, the whole SI was just three divisions. But with the SRA and the Europeans kicking in, who knows?”
“They will tell us soon enough,” the German lieutenant says. “I know that Eurocorps has sent one regiment.”
“Every bit counts,” I say, feeling slightly disappointed. One regiment means two battalions of troops—not nothing, but thirteen hundred troops are a mere sliver of the total Eurocorps manpower. But then I remind myself that the Eurocorps troops are mostly geared for peacekeeping on Earth, not space warfare, and that the regiment they’re sending probably constitutes most or all of their space-trained troops.
Counting heads in this room, however, does not make me feel overly confident just yet. The SOCOM team assembled on this ship is pitifully small for spearheading a landing in what is supposed to be the biggest spaceborne invasion ever. But right now there’s nothing to do but to wait for our mission parameters, so we can find out just how much we’ll have to stretch the four podhead teams in this berth.