Pod Country is the part of the ship where the mission pods are prepared and loaded before a launch. It’s a small section right behind the magazine control for the ship’s ordnance autoloader, which hoists munition into the launch tubes on demand. Cruisers like Phalanx have a set of dorsal launch tubes for nuclear missiles, but those are permanently loaded. The ship-to-ship and ship-to-surface launch tubes are in the center of the ship and face forward and out, and the space-warfare officer in CIC can select any of the ship’s half dozen different missile types to be loaded automatically. For this mission, the sixteen missile tubes on Phalanx will spit out a full salvo of bio-pods, each with one of us inside.
We load our gear into the bio-pods and secure it. On a drop ship, there’s more room for kit, but on a pod launch, all I can take along is the rifle I just picked up, my combat-controller deck, and a very small kit bag with a few spare power cells for the deck. Everything else I need is already attached to my armor or integrated in it. When I am done securing my gear in the pod, the ship’s pod rigger steps up and double-checks all the fasteners and the load balancing.
“Good to go, Lieutenant,” he says when he is done with his check. “Good luck, and Godspeed.”
My pod is the first in line on the portside. Right behind me, Dmitry is finished loading his own gear, and the pod rigger checks his work as well, to make sure nothing is loose or likely to throw the pod off-balance on its trajectory. We are lined up with eight pods on both port and starboard sides, and all the Russians are with me in the portside queue. Bringing up the rear on the portside are the Spaceborne Rescue sergeant and the Eurocorps liaison. The starboard row of pods is taken up entirely by the two teams of SI Force Recon.
I walk toward the back of Pod Country and claim one of the jump seats on the bulkhead. We don’t climb into the pods until the last possible moment before the launch because we don’t want to start depleting the oxygen in the suits earlier than necessary, so we get to ride out the time until the green light back here, in rather closer proximity than back in the berthing module. One by one, my fellow podhead comrades finish their checks and come back to join me at the rear bulkhead. It occurs to me that I’ve never dropped with any of the troopers in this group except for Dmitry. I wish I had some of my old friends here—Philbrick, Humphrey, Nez, or Macfee, my fellow combat controller who is still listed as MIA since the disaster at Sirius Ad even though there’s very little doubt that everyone we left behind in that place is now dead. But the only familiar face on this drop isn’t a longtime SI or fleet friend; it’s a Russian combat controller who was my enemy not too long ago.
“Now hear this: Orion launch in T-minus thirty,” the 1MC sounds. “Phase One begins in thirty minutes. Stand by on pods.”
I put on my helmet and activate the data monocle. Then I turn on my suit’s tactical computer and let it do its electronic handshake with Phalanx’s neural network. As a combat controller, I have elevated access to the ship’s tactical systems, enough to at least get a view of the picture in the neighborhood around the ship. It’s not strictly against the regs to use that access while I am still on the ship, but it’s not exactly encouraged, either. But I hate being situationally blind and having nothing to look at but the autoloader hatches on the bulkhead while the battle is about to start, so I let my suit computer finish its connection and bring up the tactical plot from the holotable in CIC.
Phalanx is at the head of a formation of six ships. In the middle of the formation is NACS Polaris, one of our few remaining supercarriers and the obvious centerpiece of our task force. Flying in close protective formation off her starboard is the SRA cruiser Kirov. On her portside, the Eurocorps frigate Westfalen is keeping pace, and trading slightly behind the carrier is the SRA destroyer Yinchuan. Bringing up the rear is a familiar hull number: AOE-1, NACS Portsmouth, the large fleet supply ship that served as our mobile base during the Leonidas mission almost two months ago. I turn on an external camera feed off Polaris’s stern and see that Portsmouth is still wearing the rough and pebbly black paint job she received in the SOCOM yard before we set out on our covert mission to reclaim Arcadia. As a strike force, this is as much combat power as I’ve seen put together since the joint-fleet evacuation of New Svalbard, and it’s almost unbelievable at this point that there are seven more task forces of roughly similar composition moving toward Mars with us.
With nothing better to do than to wait for the green light, I watch the plot, our little cluster of blue and green icons creeping closer to Mars every minute. The tactical officer in CIC cycles through the magnification scale every few minutes to give the skipper updates on the big picture. The task group is split neatly into task forces, all waiting their turn in the battle order, spread across five hundred kilometers of space in all directions. It’s a mind-blowing display of combat power, but I remember Indy’s desperate run around Mars last year, and the amount of capital-ship wrecks that were floating in space as we zoomed by at full throttle, Lankies on our tail. For a force of this magnitude, the comms are eerily silent. I don’t hear any of the usual chatter that goes with maneuvering a task group of this size. The Lankies can sense active radiation, and the fleet has been cruising under EMCON Bravo—strictly limited transmissions—since we left the assembly point.
“Orion launch in T-minus fifteen. Stand by for final FO targeting update.”
FO, the forward observer, is NACS Cincinnati, on station a few tens of thousands of kilometers ahead, a black hole in space. Cincinnati has been using its powerful optical arrays to keep tabs on the Lanky seed ships near Mars. The Orions need a while to get up to Lanky-killing fractional light-speed velocity, so we need to fire them from much further out than the task force can spot the Lankies on passive arrays, but with Cincinnati feeding us updated targeting data, it will be like aiming a rifle at a target just out of arm’s reach. And for the first time ever, we are ambushing them, initiating the attack instead of reacting to theirs.
The update from Cincinnati comes in a minute or two later, and the tactical display updates with the current position of every Lanky ship between us and Mars. My heart skips a beat when I see the orange icons representing seed ships all popping up at once on the long-range situational display. We are far out of their weapon range, but seeing the color orange on a tactical plot will give me anxiety for the rest of my life, even if we win this battle and I get to live to 110.