Chains of Command (15 page)

“It’s a gamble,” General Lazarus says. “The eternal generals’ dilemma. Go too soon, risk failure. Wait too long, risk losing initiative to the enemy. I don’t think there has ever been a military campaign planner who was happy with what was on the board when the campaign kicked off.”

“There may be a mission in the works. One that could put more stuff on the board before this whole mess begins. Maybe even enough to influence the outcome.”

“But you can neither confirm nor deny,” General Lazarus says with a tiny smile.

“That’s correct,” I say with an equally measured smile.

“I’m guessing that’s what that new rank is about.” He nods at the stars on my shoulder boards.

“I’m trying to staff a platoon,” I say. “And I’m here because I want to ask your permission to borrow someone under your command. To serve as my right hand for that mission.”

General Lazarus’s right eyebrow takes a slight upward angle for a moment.

“And who did you have in mind?” he asks, even though I’m certain that he knows exactly which one of his troopers I intend to recruit.

“Master Sergeant Fallon,” I say. “No better infantry platoon NCO in the entire Corps. Or what’s left of it.”

General Lazarus chuckles. Then he leans forward, rests his elbows on his knees, and steeples his fingers. He studies me for a moment or two while lightly tapping his chin with his fingertips.

“Master Sergeant Fallon,” he repeats slowly. “Master Sergeant Fallon is one of my most important assets. She is in charge of the NCO development for the Brigade. She trains all my new sergeants. I consider her indispensable at this point.”

“I was hoping I could convince you to let her join me for a few weeks,” I say.

He looks at me and folds his arms in front of his chest, a little smile playing in the corners of his mouth as if he’s trying to decide whether I am joking, or just incredibly brazen.

“And why would I give up one of my senior noncommissioned officers to go on a Fleet mission? What are you putting on the table for me as an incentive? What do I get out of it?”

“If we’re successful, you may never have to worry about fighting Lankies down here again,” I say.

“And if you’re not, I may lose the primary mentor of my noncom corps.” He shakes his head. “I want to see the Lankies gone as much as anyone, but loaning you Master Sergeant Fallon is a lot of certain risk for very uncertain reward. You’re going to have to do better than that.”

“What is it you want?” I ask. “I don’t have any pull with the general staff. I can’t get you any new gear.”

“We have gear,” General Lazarus says. “Lots of it. HD has transferred a lot of the old reserve equipment to us. It’s not the most modern, but it’s sufficient, and it allows us to standardize. No, you’ll have to put something more useful on the table. You know our needs. I discussed them with you last year when I made you the offer to join us.”

I know where he’s going with this, of course. He has me over a barrel, and I know that he knows it by the tiny smile that never leaves the corners of his mouth even as he pretends to be nonplussed.

I let out a small sigh.

“Fine. Fine. You let me borrow Master Sergeant Fallon for this mission, I will take that training slot you offered me. I’ll train your guys for one year, get a program off the ground.”

“Two,” he says.

“Eighteen months,” I say. “A year and a half. And only after we’ve taken care of the immediate threat. After Mars.”

General Lazarus puts the tips of his steepled fingers to his lips again and studies me for a few moments as he ponders my offer.

“Done,” he says.

“Thank you, sir,” I say, trying not to let my profound relief show in my voice.

“Don’t be too thankful just yet,” the general says. “That’s only half the battle. The other half is going to be convincing Master Sergeant Fallon. I can only give her permission to join you. I can’t order her to join you. That sell is all up to you, Lieutenant.”

CHAPTER 13

“This is a sad fucking day for the military,” Sergeant Fallon says when I step out of the elevator and into the tower atrium. She’s waiting in the elevator bank vestibule in immaculate parade rest, hands behind her back, feet spread a shoulder’s width apart. Then she steps forward and gives me a rough and quick hug.

“Been a while, Andrew,” she says.

“That’s a fact,” I say.

“I suppose I should have saluted you instead,” Sergeant Fallon says. “A fucking lieutenant. Of all the NCOs I’ve known, I would have put money on you being the last to accept a commission.”

“You’re exempt,” I say. “And not just because of the blue ribbon.”

As a Medal of Honor recipient, Sergeant Fallon has the prerogative to receive salutes from anyone regardless of rank difference, so she wouldn’t have to salute me anyway. But even without the medal, I would have felt odd about receiving a salute from my old squad leader, a woman who has been in the service since I was in elementary school, and whose combat record makes mine look like I’m a towel-counting supply jockey.

“What are you doing here, Andrew? Thought you had enough of this turf for the rest of your days.”

“I came to see you,” I say. “Got something to ask you.”

“Must be important if you’re all the way out here in Shitville. Is your wife with you, too?”

“No, she’s up at Luna, still training pilots.”

“Well, she did all right last year. Guess they’re learning from someone good.”

The atrium is an enormous square that makes up most of the ground floor of the residence tower. The buildings have a hollow core, for convection cooling and ventilation, and you can see all the way from the atrium floor to the reinforced concrete roof. Tonight, the halves of the roof are open to let the warm summer air circulate. Out on the atrium, people are milling about alone and in small groups, and nobody is paying any particular attention to us.

“I was about to walk over to the interchange to grab a drink and watch the race. Why don’t you come along? We can drink shitty beer and talk a bit.”

“Watch the race?” I ask.

“Yeah. Come, and I’ll show you. It’s what passes for Friday night fun around here now. Beats firefights any night of the week, let me tell you.”

We walk out of the residence tower and into the plaza in the center of the block, which is quite a bit livelier than the atrium. It’s a warm night, and people are out as they usually are when the weather is good. There are vendor stalls lining the sides of the plaza, and the noise level is raucous but not hostile. It feels a lot like the safer parts of my old PRC back home, where you can spend an evening drinking with your friends without having to worry about ending up in a crossfire between gangs or contraband dealers.

“That took a shitload of work,” Sergeant Fallon says when I tell her so. “When we dropped here the night we lost Stratton and Paterson and I lost my leg, this place was a free-fire jungle. People killing each other over rations. Food riots. TA raids. This was the worst of the worst.”

She points to our right, past the next cluster of residence towers visible beyond the retaining wall of the block we’re in.

“That neighborhood is about five klicks that way, by the way. In case you ever want to do some fucked-up sightseeing.”

“No, thank you,” I reply. I have no interest in seeing the street again where my squad mates died, or the building entrance where we huddled for our last stand and I almost bought the farm after getting shot three times.

“I did, a few months ago,” Sergeant Fallon says.

“Why the fuck would you do that?”

“I don’t know, really. To understand better? To come to terms with it? Fuck, I have no idea. Maybe I wanted to see if there were still bloodstains on the asphalt where that round blew off half my leg.”

“And?”

She shakes her head.

“Nope. Place looks a lot different in daylight. I hardly recognized it. Remember that high-rise you blew up with a thermobaric?”

“Yeah,” I say, and the memory triggers a sudden twisting feeling in my gut.

“It’s still there. Just a little shorter than before. You took out the top ten floors. They just cleared the rubble and put a new roof on.”

“Let’s keep that little detail to ourselves,” I say. “I don’t care to broadcast that around here.”

“It was collateral damage,” Sergeant Fallon says. “You can’t put a gun emplacement on a building and then complain when it gets return fire. None of the Brigade guys would give you shit for what you did. Well, not much.”

“So how did they turn this place around like that?” I ask, eager to move on to a different subject.

“Brigade took over the policing. Recruited from the neighborhoods. Veterans only, at first. Then the locals who weren’t complete shitheads. The trainable ones, not the hard cases from the gangs. Treat ’em right, teach ’em how to do their jobs, crack down on the ones who can’t handle the power. Street by street. Block by block. Work with the hood rats, not against them.”

“Looks like it worked out well.”

“Eventually,” Sergeant Fallon says. “Took years of blood and sweat. And parts of the city still aren’t Brigade-controlled. Probably never will be. Too hard-ass even for the general to crack. Can’t police people who don’t want to be policed. But here in the quiet part, you can be out past 2200 again without getting stomped into the curb.”

“I see you all have matching gear now,” I say, and point to the M4 carbine Sergeant Fallon wears slung over her shoulder.

“We have an arrangement with HD now. They gave us all the old United States surplus from the wartime reserve depots. Vehicles, rifles, ammunition. Billions of rounds. It’s all ancient as fuck, but it still works. And we can finally standardize our training and issue. Hard to even come up with a weapons training manual if your army uses whatever they can find,” she says.

“Mind-blowing,” I say. “A few years ago we were shooting at each other. Now HD is providing weapons.”

“It’s a good trade for them,” Sergeant Fallon says. “We keep the peace in the PRCs for them, and all they’re out is a few storage depots full of obsolete gear. We still don’t have the firepower to match the HD or SI battalions, but it’s more than enough to keep a firm hand on the PRCs. I’d call that a win-win situation for the new government.”

From beyond the retaining wall on the far side of the plaza, I hear loud engine noises, the raucous, thundering racket of old combustion engines. It echoes and reverberates in the canyons of the streets between the high-rises.

“What the fuck is that?” I ask.

“The race,” Sergeant Fallon says. “You’ll see.”

In the street that separates this residence block from the next, there’s a crowd lining the sidewalks, and there are barriers on both ends of the block to close this section of road to traffic. Someone laid out an ellipse shape on the asphalt with orange polyplast fencing, the sort used for temporary traffic control. There are LEDs set up on the retaining walls of the adjoining residence blocks to illuminate the scene beyond what the street lighting can contribute. It’s an ad hoc temporary racetrack a hundred meters long and maybe thirty meters wide. On the track, two vehicles are revving their engines next to each other. Both are old Army all-terrains, but these look like they’ve been stripped of everything that isn’t strictly necessary for driving. They’re barely more than frames with driver seats and engines.

I shoot Sergeant Fallon an incredulous look.

“We had more vehicles than we needed all of a sudden,” she says with a shrug.

“And they use them for racing?”

“
Panem et circenses
,” she replies. “Bread and circuses. Nothing wrong with a little fun. Don’t tell me they never had stuff like this where you grew up.”

The noise from the racetrack and the surrounding crowd is impressive, and we stay a good distance away—close enough to watch the action, far enough away to still be able to have a conversation. On the track, the stripped-down all-terrains send up dark clouds of exhaust fumes as they continue to gun their noisy engines. Then they release their brakes and barrel down the makeshift racetrack, and the crowd cheers.

“People make their own fun, whatever shit they find themselves in,” Sergeant Fallon says. “Let them watch these things go fast around a circle. Beats the shit out of watching them shoot each other in the alleys.”

Sergeant Fallon walks over to one of the nearby vendor stalls and returns with two bottles that don’t bear any labels. She hands one to me and uncaps her own. Then she takes a swig, closes her eyes, and sighs.

“Needed that after today.”

“What is this stuff?” I ask, eyeing the bottle suspiciously. The plastic is green and opaque. I pop off the cap and smell the contents. It has a familiar artificial fruit tang to it.

“They call it Bug Juice. The base is fruit juice made from ration packet powder. Then they add a few shots of ethanol. A few liberal shots.”

I take a swig, surprised to find that the concoction is actually not awful. It certainly beats the soy beer we can get in the military clubs.

“It’s no Shockfrost,” I say. “But it’s all right.”

Sergeant Fallon winces. “Nothing’s a Shockfrost ’cept a Shockfrost. You could run a drop ship with that stuff. Best thing about that godforsaken ball of frozen shit.”

She’s talking about New Svalbard, of course, where we got stuck for months last year just before the Exodus. Whenever I remember that little ice moon and the rough crowd that settled it, I vacillate between dread and something that feels strangely like homesickness. It’s a lonely, harsh, frozen colony, and it’s on the ass end of settled space and terribly vulnerable, but there’s something clean and pure and simple about it. The more complexities this profession throws at me, the more I find myself thinking that New Svalbard would not be the worst of all choices for a retirement colony. But I keep that opinion to myself, because Sergeant Fallon would have me forcibly committed to the mental ward at Great Lakes if I shared it with her.

“You didn’t come here to discuss the relative merits of local booze production,” Sergeant Fallon says matter-of-factly. She nods over to some nearby concrete barriers, and we both sit down, a little out of the way of the crowds that have gathered to watch the noisy race.

“There’s a special mission in the works,” I say. “Deep-space recon.”

“Where to?” she asks.

“I have no idea,” I say. “Yet. But I can tell you who we’re going after.”

I make a sweeping gesture with my bottle to encompass the scene around us—the racetrack, the high-rise residence towers, the city as a whole.

“The fuckers who ran away just before the Lankies dropped on our heads. The ones who were supposed to hold the fucking line. The ones who left us to clean up the mess they left behind.”

“That a fact.” Sergeant Fallon takes another swig from her bottle and grimaces. “We found out where they went, huh?”

“Colonel Campbell’s recon drones did. The ones he left on station at that secret anchorage right before we came back to New Svalbard. They recorded all the message and data traffic right up until their whole fleet took off and made Alcubierre.”

“Well, I’ll be dipped in shit,” she says. “Corps intel actually good for something for a change.”