Chains of Command (26 page)

Major Masoud concludes the briefing by clearing the holoscreen of all ancillary windows and projections until only the system map remains. He zooms out the scale until it includes the target moon—Arcadia—and our orbital trajectory. The lonely little blue icons labeled BERLIN and PORTSMOUTH are inching along on the dotted ellipse that marks our course.

“Jump-off is in thirty-nine hours,” he announces. “The company will be ready to embark at t-minus thirty-six hours. Double- and triple-check your kit. If it isn’t on the drop ships when we push off, it might as well be on the other side of the Alcubierre node. Pilots will cross-check and synchronize their navigational data with
Portsmouth
Ops.”

He looks at the assembled officers and senior NCOs in the room with a stern face.

“Make no mistake, ladies and gentlemen. I know this is going to sound like most motivational prejump pep talks you’ve heard, but this is probably the single most important mission you’ll ever be a part of. This isn’t about taking some dusty piece of shit moon away from the SRA, or scraping some Lanky town off the face of a colony planet. Our success or failure may decide the outcome of the greatest battle in the history of humanity. Our hundred and fifty troopers can be the weight that makes the scale tip one way or the other.”

He smiles grimly.

“And if we can serve these traitorous, thieving sacks of shit the bill they deserve for leaving the rest of us at the mercy of the Lankies, then I’m going to count that as a perk. Dismissed,” he shouts into the chorus of cheers that follows his declaration.

Next to me, Sergeant Fallon does not cheer. Instead, she looks at me and smiles her sardonic little lopsided smile.

“Ooh-fucking-rah,” she says mockingly.

CHAPTER 21

Thirty-nine hours—it’s amazing how they can simultaneously feel like an eternity and no time at all.

As an enlisted podhead, you mostly only have to worry about yourself and your own gear prior to a drop. I am not used to having to worry about forty troopers and their gear, but Sergeant Fallon is, and she gently waves me off after I check on the platoon for the tenth time in as many hours.

“Leave the nuts-and-bolts shit to your NCOs,” she says. “You need to learn the magic word. Delegate.”

“Delegate,” I say.

“That’s right. Now get the fuck off my quarterdeck, sir. The junior enlisted get jumpy when the lieutenant looks over their shoulders too much.”

“Carry on then, Sergeant,” I say. “See? Delegating.”

She makes a sweeping-away motion with her fingers, and I resist the urge to make a one-fingered motion in return, just in case some of the privates are looking our way.

The module section of the ship is abuzz with prelaunch activity. The platoons are checking their gear and putting on battle armor, and the drop ship crews are loading their birds and checking systems. Halley is the pilot of Second Platoon’s drop ship, and I meander over into their section of the ship, astern from ours. I find my wife in the aviation module, where she is checking the gear her platoon has tied down in the cargo hold of her Blackfly.

“Shouldn’t you be checking on your platoon?” she says when she spots me by the hatch. She gives one of the tie-down straps on the pallet next to her an experimental tug and then walks down the tail ramp and over to where I am standing.

“Sergeant Fallon kicked me out because I was doing too much of that.”

Halley is dressed in her combat flight suit, which is a one-piece jumpsuit with about a million external pockets. Over the suit, she’s wearing a light armor vest. Her sidearm is strapped to her thigh, and she’s as dressed and ready for battle as drop ship pilots get, minus her helmet. For my taste, that armor vest doesn’t cover nearly enough essential parts of her anatomy.

“That’s a lot of fuel,” I say and nod at the enormous external fuel tanks hanging from the wings of the Blackfly. Like everything else on the drop ship, they don’t have straight lines or right angles anywhere.

“I’ve never taken along four drop packs,” she says. “That thing is going to handle like a wallowing swine when we hit atmosphere.”

“I wish you were in the driver’s seat of my bus.”

“I don’t,” she replies. “Too much pressure. You have Lieutenant Dorian. He knows his shit. He’ll get your mudlegs down into the dirt in one piece.”

“He can handle that ship,” I concede. “But I like having you close.”

“I’ll be close, Andrew. We’re going in ten-minute intervals. I’ll be right behind you.” She looks around the hangar pod and flexes her hands. “God, it’s been a while. First combat drop since Earth last year.”

“Good times,” I say, and she laughs and shakes her head.

“God help me, but I do love it. All of it.”

“You aren’t right in the head,” I say.

“You love it, too,” Halley says. “And don’t pretend that you don’t. You wouldn’t have taken that mission otherwise. You love it just as much as I do. Getting ready for a fight, being scared shitless, all your nerves on edge. But you feel more alive than ever.”

“I guess we’re both nuts,” I say.

Halley looks around the hangar pod again. There are techs near the front of the drop ship, unhooking hoses and data umbilicals, but nobody is paying any attention to us this very moment. Then she pulls me close and kisses me.

“I am so glad for all of this. You, me, us being here, everything that happened to us since Basic. I wouldn’t trade it for the world, Lankies and all. If we end up a frozen cloud of stardust today, I know that I’ve fucking lived.” She lets go of my tunic and straightens out the fabric gently with her hand. “And we’ll be together out here until the universe collapses. Beats the shit out of having your ashes packed into a stainless steel capsule and shoved into a hole in the wall.”

“Now, see,” I say, “and you thought you had absolutely no romantic bones in your body.”

“Go and gear up,” she says. “I’ll see you out in the black. I’m right behind you. Wherever it is we’re headed.”

Standing there in the hangar pod with my wife, her excitement and her confidence, surrounded by all this gear and about to drop into combat and mortal danger again, I suddenly feel a brief and powerful gladness as well. Halley is right, of course. We may die today, or we may live to be a hundred and fifty, but we will have directed our own course a little, and that’s much more than most people get these days.

“Now hear this: t-minus fifteen to launch. All mission personnel, board your ships. I repeat: all mission personnel, board your ships.”

The platoon has been ready and assembled on the quarterdeck for a while, double-checking each other’s armor latches and equipment while engaging in the traditional predrop joshing and trash-talking. Now the mood turns businesslike and serious as the squad leaders line up their charges to get ready for the short walk over to the flight module.

“All right, people. It’s showtime. Time to do something for the exorbitant salaries they pay us,” Sergeant Fallon declares.

We file out of the platoon bay by squads and cross the passageway outside to enter the flight module, where our drop ship is waiting with its tail ramp open. Because the flight module is so small, they can’t fire up the engines while there are still personnel in the pod, so the boarding process is eerily quiet aside from the chatter of the infantry grunts as they trudge up the ramp and take their seats in the hold.

“Remember the good old days back at Shughart?” Sergeant Fallon says as we watch the loading process from the back of the module.

“We had that huge airfield,” I reply. “And they used to play motivational music while we boarded.”

“Those were the days,” she replies, with a slight tinge of nostalgia in her voice. “Back when we only had to worry about hood rats with guns, not this deep-space alien invasion shit.”

“Back in the old Corps, things sure were different,” I say in a creaky, old-guy voice, and she laughs.

When all the troopers are in their jump seats inside the cargo hold, we follow up the ramp. We pass through the rows of battle-ready troopers to the front of the hold, where Sergeant Fallon takes a free seat at the top of First Platoon’s row, across from Gunny Philbrick. I take the command chair in front of the bulkhead and plug myself into the console with the data umbilical. The screens turn on and immediately start feeding me status reports.

“All aboard,” the crew chief says. He pushes the control for the tail ramp, which closes quietly. For some reason, this time it makes me think of a lid closing on a coffin.

“Passengers aboard. Verify hard seal on the cargo hold,” the crew chief sends to the flight deck.

“I show hard seal on the hold,” the pilot replies.

The now-familiar muted whine of the Blackfly’s engines starts up outside. The inside of the hold is far more crowded than during the raid on the relay station a few days ago. We have a full platoon on board, and all the jump seats in the hold are taken. In addition, half the empty space between the seat rows and the forward bulkhead is taken up by supply pallets that are strapped to the floor of the cargo hold. I have a pallet parked right behind the command chair, blocking my view of the crew chief, who is manning his own console on the starboard side of the ship.

“Comms and data check, people,” I send to my squad leaders and platoon sergeant. “Let’s make sure the wireless stuff works before we have to go EMCON.”

My squad leaders send back their acknowledgments. Sergeant Fallon adds her own virtual thumbs-up, and I check the data stream from thirty-nine armor computers. Everything is working the way it should, and everyone is in the link, connected to me via low-power wireless data streams.

“Rogue Ops, this is Rogue One Actual. Comms cross-check complete. First Platoon is ready for showtime.”

“Rogue One Actual, Rogue Actual,” Major Masoud sends back from the cargo hold of his own ride. “Copy that. You are five by five on comms and data.”

The company command section is riding with the SEALs in Blackfly Four, which doesn’t come as a big surprise to me. The major and his SEALs have been segregating themselves from the SI platoons all along, and it’s no shock that they’re not going to start mingling with us right at go-time.

Outside in the flight module, klaxons start blaring again, followed by an overhead announcement.

“All personnel, clear the pod for flight ops. Depressurizing pod in t-minus nine. I repeat, all personnel clear the pod for flight ops. Depressurizing in t-minus nine.”

“Anyone need to hit the head before we launch best hurry up,” Sergeant Fallon says to the platoon, and there’s laughter.

At launch time, the flight module goes through the same cycle as before. The air in the module is vented into space all at once when the clamshell doors of the pod open. Then the launch boom extends, and the Blackfly trundles outward on it, carried by the docking clamp overhead. We reach the end of the boom and come to a stop with a slight shudder of the hull.

“
Portsmouth
Ops, Blackfly One is locked in and ready for launch sequence,” the pilot sends to our host ship.

“Blackfly One, copy. Stand by for remote launch initiation. In ten . . . nine . . . eight . . .”

I think of Halley, who is in the pilot seat of Blackfly Two, on the other side of
Portsmouth
’s hull and slightly astern from us. She’ll be directly behind us on our trajectory, ten minutes apart. On a normal drop, she’d be well in visual range, and I could probably see her cockpit with enough magnification from the stern camera array, but these are Blackflies, and their polychromatic armor plating will make them practically disappear. Still, I know she’s going to be out there with me.

“. . . three, two, one. Launch.”

We drop free and float away from the hull of
Portsmouth
. Our pilot increases thrust on the engines and clears the ship by a few hundred meters before he turns the nose around. We pass underneath
Portsmouth
, and I watch the supply ship continue on its course with the drop ship’s dorsal camera array until she’s just a small black dot, emitting a faint glow from the shielded engine nozzles in her stern.

“Burning for intercept trajectory in three . . . two . . . one. Burn.”

Our pilot fires up the engines for acceleration burn. Once again I am amazed at the low noise level inside the cargo hold. The Blackfly really is quieter at full throttle than all the other drop ships are at idle. Combined with her polychromatic armor, she’s the perfect tool for high-risk commando stuff. I’ve been a podhead for years, and the fact that I’ve never even heard of this new class of drop ship makes me a little anxious. If they could keep these drop ships secret even from the rest of the podhead community, what else is floating around out there with the renegade fleet that we’ve never encountered?

“We’re on the way,” I send to Sergeant Fallon. “Just like old times, huh?”

“Not really,” she replies. “I’m used to breathable air on the outside of the hull.”