I spend the next half day wasting time on the carrier with decontamination, grabbing chow, and getting a fresh set of fatigues from the supply division. The flight deck is packed nose-to-ass with people and equipment, but unlike on the trip to Mars, nothing is neat or orderly. The emergency dustoff happened so quickly that the crews had no time for organization. The drop ships loaded us up and dumped us wherever they had space, and it takes the three of us six hours to catch a ride on a drop ship that’s transporting Phalanx personnel back to their own ship. I look around in the cargo hold on the short trip over to Phalanx, but I don’t see anyone else from the SOCOM detachment other than Dmitry and Lieutenant Stahl, and my heart sinks a little. The MilNet is off-line, and TacLink is hopelessly overloaded and chaotic. I try to get a message through to Halley, but the network is so slow that even the failure notification takes thirty minutes to get back to me. Fighting against awful odds on the surface is one thing, but being stuck in orbit on a warship in near chaos, with no way to communicate with your wife or even check on her whereabouts, is a thousand times worse.
Back on Phalanx, I report in with the CO, even though there’s nothing I want more right now than a private shower in my stateroom in Grunt Country and twenty-four straight hours of sleep. Colonel Yamin is in CIC with Major Masoud, who regards me with an expression that almost looks like paternalistic concern.
“We got our asses kicked,” I conclude after I give my version of events.
“How do you figure, Lieutenant?” Major Masoud says.
“We’ll never get them off Mars. They’re underground now. They figured out how we fight, and they adopted countermeasures. It would take ten times the troops we had today, and we’d still lose half of them if we went down into the tunnels and flushed them out. Greenland was enough for me, sir.”
“Tactically, we have a stalemate on Mars,” Major Masoud agrees. “But we achieved almost all of our objectives. We rescued five thousand civilians, Lieutenant. Every holdout installation except for one. And we never needed to take all of Mars, just deny its use to the Lankies.”
“If those underground seed ships make it into orbit, they’ll have twice as many as before, sir. I’d bet that every settlement down there is really a seed ship. And I’ve seen other stuff . . .”
My voice trails off when I think of the Lankies carrying the dead bodies of our SI troopers back to their tunnels. Maybe some of them were even still alive. And we won’t ever be able to go back and rescue them, or recover any bodies.
“We are leaving a garrison fleet in orbit,” Major Masoud says. “The cruisers are taking on more ammunition as soon as the next wave of supply ships gets here. They are nuking all the Lanky sites they can find right now. I’m sure that in the next few days, they’ll nuke them all a few times over. The fight isn’t won yet, but by God, we haven’t lost here. We made them bleed.”
He looks at me and points to the CIC hatch.
“Go take care of yourself, Lieutenant Grayson. I don’t want to see you out and about for another forty-eight hours. We will have plenty of time for a thorough debriefing on the way back to Earth. Clean up, eat, and get some sleep. We won a great victory today.”
“Yes, sir,” I say. This is the first order Major Masoud has ever given me where I don’t feel like I’m being pulled around by marionette strings, and I don’t utter a word of dissent.
There are things I have to take care of before I even fix myself. Back in Grunt Country, which is empty except for my Russian and Euro comrades who are already in their bunks, I go into my stateroom and turn on the neural-networks terminal. My personal message box is just the way I left it, with only two new messages on top of the read stack. One is from my mother’s privileged-dependent account, and the other is from Gunny Philbrick. I check the time stamp of Philbrick’s message and see that it’s from today. I don’t need to open it to know that he’s okay, and if Humphrey or Nez got killed down on Mars, I don’t want to know right now anyway. But there’s no message from Halley, and I know she would have sent one if she had made it back from the surface already.
I fire off a message to her account to let her know that I’m okay, and tell her to reply the second she gets into network range again. We don’t even have casualty lists out yet—everything is still in fresh postbattle chaos—and the pleasure of a hot shower and a clean bunk is tempered by my anxiety. I don’t know if my wife is still alive, in the cockpit of a drop ship ferrying soldiers up to their carrier, or maybe holed up on the surface of Mars somewhere, waiting for a rescue that won’t come. I don’t want to contemplate her death, or the myriad ways in which she may have died down there, but my brain serves up a few of those anyway.
We won a great victory today, Major Masoud said to me in CIC. But I don’t feel like we won a great victory. I feel like we went up in the ring against an evenly matched opponent, and we both took turns beating the living shit out of each other and left the ring without a clear winner.
I don’t hear anything from Halley on the entire weeklong ride back from Mars to Gateway Station.
I log into my data terminal compulsively about fifty times every day, even though I have a PDP in my pocket that will relay the same messages to me, just so I don’t have to wait for the wireless delay if a message does come in. But for a week straight, my inbox stays empty except for meaningless fleet bullshit and a few messages from my old friend Gunny Philbrick, who dropped into LZ Blue with Humphrey and Nez as his squad leaders. Humphrey is still alive but earned her third Purple Heart from friendly-fire shrapnel. Nez is gone, killed in action while trying to hold back a Lanky counteroffensive with a squad of green SI troopers, who all died to the last man and woman.