I know that Dmitry made one of the last flights out, because we were on the same Dragonfly. He took a shuttle over to the SRA carrier a few hours later, sparse with his good-byes in what I now know to be typical Russian brevity. I do wonder if Maksim survived the battle. As rock hard as Dmitry is, I feel that the loss of Maksim would wound him more than any Lanky ever could, and I hope the best for my new friend and his spouse.
In those cheesy military flicks on the Networks, things would have gone differently. I would have dropped with my wife in the cockpit of my drop ship and all my friends and comrades by my side, and we would have fought together. We would have taken some losses, friends dying in heroic last stands and giving profound last statements, and it would have all taught us something about duty and sacrifice and the futility of war. But this is real life. In a real war, you drop into battle with troops you’ve never met before, and your spouse is deployed thousands of kilometers away from you. In real battle, good people die fast and awful deaths, and terrible people make it out unscathed. Dozens of civilians die at the moment of their long-awaited rescue because an officer makes a bad split-second call, and then that officer dies with those civvies and never even gets a chance to regret his mistake.
In a real war, the enemy can take a savage beating and then turn the tables on you in an hour to force a bloody stalemate even though you’ve each killed thousands on the other side. Tires blow, batteries die, vital shots miss their target, and unlikely shots score almost-impossible bull’s-eyes. When I was young and impressionable, I thought of war as a sort of romantic crucible, a test of one’s manhood and mettle. In reality, it’s merely a challenge to one’s ability to stay sane.
But we will be back, again and again, as long as it takes until either we get wiped out or we annihilate them. Because just like the Lankies, we, too, are a species who just doesn’t seem to know when it is beaten.
EPILOGUE
When the fleet returns to Gateway a week after Mars, the civilian fleet in Earth orbit repeats their earlier gesture for us. They line the approaches to the space station and blink their lights in synchronicity, to show their gratitude for what we did for the planet. I want to feel appreciation as I watch the honor salute on the external camera feed on the screen in my stateroom, but all I can think of is that Halley would have enjoyed seeing this, and that the last message I ever typed to her was right after seeing the same honor display when we departed Gateway. We all have shore leave now—technically for thirty days, but it’s understood that no brass is going to jump anyone’s shit for overstaying their leave this time around. I’ve never felt such a profound level of mental and physical fatigue before, a deep and aching tiredness that goes beyond a lack of sleep or a hard-fought battle.
I’d spent most of that week clutching my PDP and waiting for the incoming message signal to buzz. I sent Halley a message every day. At first, they were just requests, then pleas to get in touch with me. By the third day, I was writing her longer messages, detailing the stuff we’re going to do together once we’re back home, knowing full well that she may never read what I wrote.
Now that we are back, we have many after-battle briefings where everyone brings everyone else up to speed. The task force got off relatively light in space—we lost the priceless Agincourt, of course, but rescued most of her crew, and only one space control cruiser and an older frigate were lost to Lanky mines during the operation.
We only lost one member of our SOCOM team—the Spaceborne Rescueman, Lieutenant Paquette. He jumped into a drop-ship crash site and defended two wounded pilots and a dead crew chief against six Lankies and took down two before they overwhelmed the site. Word has it that Brigade is going to put him in for the Medal of Honor. All the Russians survived the battle and transferred to the carrier Minsk a day after our departure. I have grown fond of Dmitry, and I’m glad that he gets to go home and see his husband, Maksim, again, which makes the uncertainty about Halley’s fate even more painful than it is already. There are a lot of dog tags to sort out, and there’s a long list of names of troopers whose tags aren’t officially collected but whose whereabouts are unknown. With so many brigades dispersed over so many ships, it’ll take days to sort out everything—at least that’s what I tell myself.
Twenty thousand SI troopers and SOCOM troops dropped onto Mars. Eleven thousand five hundred returned, and almost two thousand of those are wounded. Four thousand nine hundred are confirmed dead, and another three thousand six hundred are missing and presumed killed. On the opposing side, the Lankies got it much worse. We killed over ten thousand in direct combat, and God only knows how many when we nuked every single “settlement” seed-ship location from orbit at the end of the battle. They lost their entire fleet above Mars, and while there are suspected to be two or three stragglers out there patrolling the Alcubierre nodes, they haven’t approached Mars or bothered the garrison fleet that’s keeping an eye on things from above. We rescued eighteen different holdout shelters all over Mars and only failed to save the population of a single shelter.
Mars was a write-off from the beginning. The Lanky terraforming would have taken ten to fifteen years to reverse even if we had scraped all the Lankies off the planet. With the radiation from fifty high-yield nukes dropped on the seed-ship building sites, it will take much longer now for Mars to become suitable for life again. We can’t use it anymore—but neither can the Lankies, and that was the objective all along: to take away their operating base in the solar system and remove the direct threat to Earth. They can’t move against us with what they have left on Mars, with no seed ships to threaten Earth, and we have moved back into our respective corners with our noses bleeding and our eyes swollen shut. But I’m sure both our species will be back for the next round once we have caught our breath and nursed our wounds. We’ve pushed each other too far for this to have an indecisive ending. Either we walk away from this, or they do, but there is no room in this universe for both our species as long as they keep coming for what’s ours.
I feel like I’ve left half of me behind on Mars, and I won’t get that part of me back, if at all, until I know for sure where my wife is now and what happened to her. But my PDP is still silent when I gather my things and leave the ship for the lonely shuttle ride back to Earth.