Chains of Command (25 page)

The platoon has converted the quarterdeck into a fighting ring. In the absence of a proper ring with ropes and posts, they have rigged a virtual one with tape markers and about two dozen individual thermal foam pads from their personal gear, magnetically connected to make a square the rough size of a SIMAP ring. The Spaceborne Infantry Martial Arts Program is the close-combat system they teach the SI and Fleet grunts as soon as they get out of Basic, and it’s wildly popular as a communal exercise and intra-unit competition sport among the troops. On a warship, you don’t usually have the space to be able to run a few kilometers every day, but there’s always a five-meter-square patch of deck free somewhere to set up a SIMAP ring. In this particular makeshift ring, Corporal Giddings is currently fighting one of the privates from Second Squad. They are locked in an embrace in the center of the ring, trying to keep each other’s arms down while attempting to push the other off balance. Giddings has the better technique, but the private from Second Squad—Minie?—has probably thirty pounds on the corporal, and wins the pushing contest by sheer physics. Giddings loses his balance and stumbles backward, then falls into the crowd lining the edge of the ring. The watching troops cheer.

Sergeant Fallon is watching the scene from the edge of the little passageway between the staff berths and the quarterdeck. She’s leaning against the bulkhead, arms crossed in front of her chest, and she looks mildly amused. I walk up next to her, and she nods at me.

“Up from the dead, I see.”

“You should have roused me earlier. I look like a sloth.”

“No need to get you up,” she replies. “The NCOs had everything well in hand. Be glad you got to tune out for a good stretch.”

“You must be bored to tears. Babysitting junior NCOs, and you can’t even take a break to go see the evening race.”

“It’s a change of scenery,” she says. “And I don’t mind this. Beats getting shot at.”

The next pair on the mat are Sergeant Humphrey and Private Rogers, which seems like an unfair matchup from the start. I’ve served with Humphrey before—she was part of the SI detachment on
Indianapolis
last year, and I’ve been in the ring with her myself a few times during our long transit back to Earth. Humphrey is much stronger than she looks and rock hard when it comes to taking punches. She’s not in my weight class, but I remember how she almost cleaned my clock twice in the ring last year. Her opponent, Private Rogers, is a female SI trooper about Humphrey’s height, but without her athletic build. Rogers has blond hair she keeps in a tightly tied ponytail, a hairstyle that isn’t quite against SI regulations, but that involves considerably more maintenance hassle than the standard “helmet-short” style that Humphrey is sporting.

It seems that this particular fight would last the ten seconds it ought to take for Humphrey to make contact and punch her lighter, less muscular opponent out of the ring, but Rogers is holding her own. She’s faster and has a little bit more reach than Humphrey, and she has learned to put those advantages to use. They circle each other, and when Humphrey bulls in to flatten Rogers with a combination, her opponent moves out of the line of attack and counters with her own combination that catches Humphrey off-center. They don’t give each other much leeway, but I can tell that Humphrey is holding back just a little, turning the bout into a training opportunity for the younger private.

Sergeant Fallon and I watch as the seemingly uneven fight develops into a fluid, dynamic engagement that is fun to watch. Rogers knows that Humphrey can clean her clock at any point if she leaves herself open or slacks off, and she puts all her heart into the fight. The troopers around the ring cheer when Humphrey drops her guard just a bit near the end of the round because her arms are tired, and Rogers exploits the momentary weakness by moving in and firing off a fast left-left-right combo. The straight right makes it through Humphrey’s guard and smacks her in the mouth. The reply comes swiftly and forcefully, Humphrey returning the favor with a left jab and a powerful right cross that plows into Rogers’s gloves and makes her hit herself in the nose with her own padded fist. Then the buzzer sounds, and both fighters break off the engagement and bend over with their hands on their knees, panting and gasping for air. Humphrey is bleeding from the lip, Rogers from the nose, but both are grinning as they tap each other’s gloves.

“Not bad,” Sergeant Fallon concedes. “My little hood rats would wipe the floor with ’em, though. They don’t do rings. Or rules.”

“Why punch someone when you can shank them,” I say.

“Precisely.”

“Hey, Lieutenant,” Gunny Philbrick calls out from the other side of the quarterdeck. I look over and see that he’s putting on a pair of gel gloves. “Want to go a round?”

“Mind your rank,” Sergeant Fallon says. “You don’t mix it up with the enlisted.”

“This is SIMAP,” I reply. “There’s no rank in the ring. It’s a tradition.”

“There’s always rank,” she cautions. “Especially when there are bloody noses involved.”

Most of the troopers turn their heads to see how their platoon leader is going to respond to the challenge. If I accept, I may get my chops busted by my own platoon sergeant. If I refuse, I look like I’m chickening out. I don’t know most of the junior enlisted, but I know Philbrick, and I suspect he’s offering me a chance to show my PFCs and corporals that their leader isn’t some soft Fleet console jockey.

“Toss me some gloves,” I shout back, and some of the enlisted holler their approval. Someone else chucks a set of gel gloves in my direction, and I catch them and take off my CDU blouse.

“Can’t pass up a dick-measuring challenge, can you?” Sergeant Fallon says in a low voice and shakes her head, but she smiles dryly as she does it.

“Ain’t about that, Sarge,” I reply, and fasten the integrated wrist wraps of the gel gloves.

“Sure it ain’t.”

Wearing just the thermal undershirt on my upper body, I am keenly aware of the extra ten or fifteen pounds of garrison flab I’ve put on since I started the basic-training supervisor job last year, but the gloves still feel good on my hands. Stepping onto the mat is like walking back into a favorite rough-but-friendly watering hole. Something in my brain just switches gears whenever I feel the gel cushions over my knuckles and the tight wrap of the stabilizer around my wrist. I was never a fan of physical violence back home when I was still a PRC hood rat, but I’ve come to love the SIMAP sessions with the SI guys on deployments. It’s a simple, primal contest of skills and physical ability, and it engages your body and brain completely, with no room for mental baggage or bullshit.

“You sure you want to get punched in the face by an officer?” I ask Philbrick when we meet in the middle of the mat to touch gloves.

“Can’t find anyone else to fight,” he says. “Nez is out. And all these wimps are too chicken to punch the gunny.”

I’ve seen Philbrick fight many times in the SI rec room on
Indy
. I fought him myself at least a half dozen times, back when we both had the same rank. He’s slightly taller than I am, has more reach than I do, and he’s surprisingly nimble for a tall guy. We tap gloves and take up fighting stances, and then the fight is on.

I haven’t been in the ring for over a year, and I can feel it. Just twenty or thirty seconds of trading punches with Philbrick and I’m panting for air. He has long legs with plenty of reach, and he likes to use them in the ring. A snap-kick connects with my upper thigh and makes me grunt with the pain of the impact. I reply with a sideways kick that makes him dodge backward, but that throws him off balance a bit, and I step in and follow it up with a left-right combination that rattles his cage. Then we are close enough to each other to trade body shots for a few seconds. I dole out two and collect as many before we push apart again. On the periphery of the makeshift ring, the troopers are cheering us on, but I’m barely aware of them, tunnel vision in full effect.

In the ring, two minutes are practically an eternity. By the time the signal sounds, I’m sweaty and as worn-out as if I had run a few miles in full battle armor, and my thigh and jaw hurt from where I collected some solid, painful hits from Philbrick. But I know I got him back in roughly equal measure, and I’m glad that I was in good enough shape—or he was cautious enough—that none of us humiliated the other in front of all the junior ranks. We tap gloves again, a little worse for the wear than at the beginning of the round, and the enlisted troopers all around us voice their approval again.

“You’ve gotten slower,” Philbrick says, panting.

“And you’ve gotten uglier,” I pant back.

Overhead, the ascending two-tone trill of a 1MC announcement sounds, and the room goes quiet instantly.

“Now hear this. Platoon leaders, pilots, and senior NCOs, report to briefing room Delta at 1730 Zulu. I repeat, all platoon leaders, pilots, and senior NCOs, report to briefing room Delta at 1730 Zulu.”

I trade looks with Sergeant Fallon, who checks her chrono and makes the hand signal for “double-time.”

“Looks like fun’s over for me,” I say to Gunnery Sergeant Philbrick. “Gunny, you have the deck.”

“I have the deck,” Philbrick confirms. Then he raises his voice to address the rest of the platoon.

“On your feet and get the gear stowed, people. Let’s get ready for infantry business again.”

CHAPTER 20

There’s a familiar face in the briefing room this time, and seeing Lieutenant Colonel Renner sitting in the front row with her senior personnel is evidence that this briefing is going to kick off something big. I take a seat next to Sergeant Fallon again, and when Halley walks in with her fellow pilots, she picks the row right in front of mine. We exchange glances as she sits down, and she gives me a brief smile and a furtive thumbs-up.

Major Masoud is already at the front of the room in his worn but immaculate fatigues, the sleeves sharply folded without a single crease or wave, his camouflage beret tucked underneath the rank sleeve on the left shoulder with the beret badge precisely facing up and out. The golden thread of the drop badge sewn above the left breast pocket is so worn and faded that it looks like silver, but as far as I can see, not a single thread on his tunic is out of order.

When the entire leadership echelon of the company is in the briefing room, Major Masoud turns on the holoscreen behind him, which pops into life showing
Portsmouth
’s logo again.

“Dim lights,” he says, and the environmental AI obeys and turns the overhead lighting down. The low conversations in the room come to a halt.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we have them by the balls,” he says.

Some of the present officers and senior NCOs let out muffled laughs or chuckles, but Major Masoud’s face does not let on that he was joking in any way.

“You think I am being facetious,” he says. “Rest assured that I do not have any interest in humor at present.”

He taps the screen of his remote control, and the ship’s seal disappears from the holoscreen. In its stead, there’s now a three-dimensional situational display, with the parent star of the Leonidas system in its center and the closest three planets in elliptical orbits around the star. There’s an asteroid belt just past the orbit of the third planet, and a small pair of blue icons shaped like lozenges standing on point are on the outer edge of it.

“Task Force Rogue,” he says, and circles the ship icons on the screen. Then he zooms part of the display in on the task force ships to show their labels: BERLIN and PORTSMOUTH.

“We are just outside the substantial asteroid belt that is orbiting Leonidas between the orbits of the third and fourth planet. The station we raided yesterday was an observation post and communications relay on one of those asteroids. Lieutenant Grayson’s SI team made successful entry and obtained the intelligence off the station’s data nodes with no casualties on our side.” He nods at me, and heads turn in my direction, which makes me feel more than a little uncomfortable.

“We have the coordinate data from their antenna array, so we know which way the antennas were pointed whenever they made a transmission. We also have all their message traffic. The traitor settlement is here, on the third moon of the third planet, Leonidas c.”

The Major zooms the map out again and pans over to where the holographic representation of Leonidas c is wobbling along on its elliptical orbit. If the hologram is an accurate depiction of reality, Leonidas c is a bright blue gaseous planet.

“The moon in question is a little over half the size of Earth. The renegade sons of bitches call it Arcadia.”

The conversations in the briefing room start again at low volume. Major Masoud observes the room while he zooms the display in on the hologram depicting the third moon of Leonidas c.

“We don’t have detailed maps of the place—yet. But the stuff we got off the data nodes in that relay station is good enough to plan a full recon drop. And while I wish we had more time to send out drones and prepare the field before we go in, we don’t have any time to spare.”

He increases the display scale until the star map is showing a large enough slice to show our task force at the edge of the asteroid field on one side and Leonidas c in its orbit on the other side. There’s a lot of empty space in between, but I can see that the asteroid field orbits along the same sort of long ellipse as Leonidas c, only with a few million kilometers of space in between them.

“We know what they have in this system, but we don’t know where they’re keeping it. Lieutenant Colonel Renner?”

The skipper of
Berlin
gets up from her first-row chair and joins Major Masoud at the front of the room.

“Our best guess is that they are keeping the defensive force concentrated near their home base,” she says. “They don’t have the number of ships needed to have an effective patrol pattern in a system of this size, and their force composition practically requires them to operate in task groups. But whatever’s out there, it’s running silent like we are. We haven’t picked up any radar or active radiation source in this system except for the burst traffic the drone caught when we discovered the relay station. Not that I’m complaining, mind.” Lieutenant Colonel Renner allows herself a small smile.

“And this is where we have the advantage right now,” Major Masoud adds. “We know exactly where they are, and what they have in-system. They don’t know where we are. If they even know we are here.”

“Figure they’ll come checking when they notice their relay has gone off the air, sir,” Halley says, and several heads nod in agreement.

“Of course they’ll come check. We already have the drones looking along the likely line of approach,” Lieutenant Colonel Renner replies. “We’re kind of hoping they’ll check soon, because then we can verify without a doubt where they’ve staged their little fleet.”

“But we have to proceed with the battle plan either way, because we don’t have the time to sit and wait. Not when our fuel and food stores get depleted more every day while we are a hundred and fifty light-years from our supply lines.” Major Masoud takes over the holographic map again and zooms in on the third moon of Leonidas c.

“We know where they are,” he repeats, and stabs the hologram with his index finger. “Leonidas cs3. Arcadia.” He pronounces the name the renegade settlers gave their new home with a sarcastic little bite in his voice. “Whatever we call it, it’s their little clubhouse. And Rogue Company is going to sneak in and spoil the party.”

The briefing is long, but far from boring. In fact, in all my years doing rash and daring podhead missions in the Fleet, I’ve never seen someone put together such a breathtakingly bold and cocky mission plan. But not everyone seems convinced that the major still has all his marbles.

“You are going to send the drop ship wing on a three-million-kilometer insert?” Halley says in an incredulous voice when the major diagrams the insertion plan for the company—all four drop ships, launched from
Portsmouth
while she’s making an elliptical orbit just out of the predicted optical detection range of the known units in the renegade fleet.

“The alternative is to get this ship closer to the target moon and risk detection and destruction,” Lieutenant Colonel Renner replies for the major. “The Blackflies can make that run, and they are a hundred times stealthier.”

“That’s way out of range even for a minimum acceleration burn, and that would take us weeks,” Halley objects. “Unless we load the external hard points up with fuel tanks and take absolutely no external ordnance along. And then we can’t do fire support once we’re dirtside.”

“You’ll carry all the fuel you can cram into the externals,” Major Masoud says. “If you need to do fire support on the ground, you’ll be limited to cannons and wingtip containers. And
Berlin
’s two Wasps will fly along with buddy tanks in the hold and refuel your flight about halfway to the target.”

Halley ponders the major’s statement while her fellow pilots talk to each other again in low, excited voices.

“I’ve never made an insert from that far out. Not even close.”

“Nobody has, Captain. You’ll be setting a new Fleet record.”

“If we make it back,” the pilot sitting next to Halley says to her in a low voice, and she rewards the comment with a smirk.

“Look, you know your hardware better than I do,” Major Masoud continues. “The Blackflies are the stealthiest small units in the entire Fleet. Whatever they have in orbit, I am certain you are going to be able to sneak past it and deliver the grunts dirtside.”

“Oh, I’m not worried about being seen,” Halley replies. “I know that I can coast right past a cruiser and take samples of the hull paint without being seen. It’s the ‘getting back’ part that worries me. Even if the Wasps top us off on the way in. Atmospheric flight burns a lot of fuel.”

Major Masoud nods at Lieutenant Colonel Renner, who steps up to the display.

“Optimal launch point for low-energy trajectory to Arcadia is here”—she marks the point on the task force’s orbit—“and pickup point is going to be here.” She marks another point on the other side of the orbital ellipse. “That’s nine days later.
Berlin
and
Portsmouth
will remain on the far side of the asteroid field and keep using it as cover against optical detection. Subtracting transit time, that will give you seven days to accomplish your mission on the ground. You are to keep enough emergency fuel to make orbit and set yourself on a low-energy trajectory to the rendezvous point, and we will send the Wasps back out to meet you and refill your tanks.”

Halley and the pilot next to her exchange looks again. From Halley’s carefully neutral expression, I can’t really tell what she thinks of that plan, but she doesn’t object outright, which I know she’d do if she found the idea idiotic, no matter what the rank of the officer who proposed it.

“One company, four drop ships, one week in enemy territory,” Sergeant Fallon says next to me. “Bringing only what fits into the ships. No backup. And if things go to shit, no friends overhead.”

“In other words, business as usual,” I reply.

Of course, Sergeant Fallon and I know from personal experience that when things really go to shit for the squad on the ground, it doesn’t matter much whether the support ship is thirty minutes or thirty light-years away. Still, as I study the plot on the holoscreen, I can’t help but notice just how big this system is, and just how isolated and far from home we’re really going to be.

We spend the next hour or so in the briefing room going through the details of the mission with the whole command team, Fleet and SI alike. It’s a bold mission, but other than the extreme range of the drop ship insertion—which according to Halley is three times longer than any infiltration run she has ever done—it’s a fairly standard long-range reconnaissance run in company strength, the kind that is pretty much the bread and butter of the podheads. And knowing that we are going up against other humans—and fellow North Americans at that—makes the whole thing feel a little less perilous. But when I say this out loud to Sergeant Fallon, she laughs and looks at me as if I just told her a dumb joke.

“You of all people should know better,” she says. “Like your own people can’t shoot you up just as well as the SRA.”

“Point taken,” I concede, and touch the spot on my side where I have scars from fléchettes fired by an NAC Defense Corps rifle, with a hand that has two prosthetic fingers that replaced the ones shot off by an NAC security officer last year.