Chains of Command (6 page)

“I’m good,” Halley says. “If I have any more, I’ll start humming like a rail gun.”

“I’ve had my fill for now,” I agree. “Let’s give these folks their table back and go get some fresh air.”

“Copy that,” Halley says and gets out of the booth.

“Don’t worry about lunch,” I say to Mom, who collects our coffee mugs and wipes down the table. I feel vaguely guilty for having my mother clean up after me like I’m living at home in the PRC with her again, but she waves me off when I try to take the mugs from her.

“Go for a stroll with your wife and let me do my job, Andrew.”

“All right, Mom. See you in a little while.”

We walk out of the restaurant, Halley in the lead as usual. When I reach the door, I look back to see my mother watching us from the doorway of the kitchen, a little smile on her face. She turns around when our eyes meet, but I can see that the smile doesn’t leave her face as she walks into the kitchen.

“Look at them going about their day,” Halley says.

We’re walking down Main Street, our romantic little stroll slightly encumbered by the alert bags slung over our shoulders. It’s a cool and sunny day, and the clean, cold air is biting my lungs just a little. Halley pats me lightly on the back when I cough.

“Catch something from the boots at Orem?” she asks.

“Nope. It’s the air,” I say. “Too cold and clean.”

“Ah.” She chuckles softly. “I can’t decide whether that’s funny or sad.”

“What, me coughing?”

“No, your system so used to breathing shit. Think about it. Most of your life, you’ve been sucking down either dirty PRC air or the filtered and recycled air on spaceships. Your lungs can’t handle the clean stuff anymore.”

“You should go to New Svalbard sometime,” I say. “If it’s still there after all of this. Cleanest goddamn air in the universe. The place is so cold that it never thaws, not even in their summers. It smells like absolutely nothing.”

Halley smoothly maneuvers around a civvie family with two kids who are standing on the sidewalk in front of one of the shops. One of the children looks at her, mouth agape. Halley winks at the little boy and cocks an imaginary pistol with her hand. The boy’s eyes wander from her face down to the holstered pistol on her hip.

“Don’t see that around here too much, do you, kid?” she murmurs when we are well past the family.

“They don’t need ’em,” I say. “Hundred klicks from the nearest shithole, one way in and out, and lots of cops to guard their ’burbs.”

“We might as well be on a Lanky planet,” Halley says. “We’re total strangers here.”

“At least they like having us around now.”

“’Course they do.” Halley grins without humor. “When your trash is full, you’re damn glad to see the garbage crew. Doesn’t mean you’re going to invite them to your dinner party.”

I look back at the family walking down the street, away from us, on the way to some shopping or leisure, maybe a stop at Chief Kopka’s restaurant for a long lunch. Even their moderate middle-class wealth is an unobtainable level of luxury for a PRC rat. When I was younger, I would have been resentful to the point of hatred. Now I understand that they are no more responsible for their station in life than I was for mine when I was eighteen and living on two thousand calories of soy and recycled shit every day. Our old grievances are tiny and pointless with the Lankies at the gates.

“We chose to be the garbage crew,” I say. “If you signed up to get dinner party invites from the civvies, you picked the wrong career.”

“Don’t I know it.” She hooks her arm into the crook of mine and pulls me closer to her. “My husband, the levelheaded idealist. I like it when you get all principled.”

“I don’t have those. Well, except for maybe one. Don’t let dumb-ass junior officers get you killed in the field.”

Halley lets go of my arm and taps the rank insignia on my shoulder with her finger.

“Mark my words, Sergeant Chip-on-My-Shoulder. One of these days, you’ll be wearing officer stars, too. And then you’ll get to roll your eyes at know-it-all NCOs.”

I bark a laugh.

“The day I accept an officer commission is the day you’ll see a parade of Lankies tap-dancing down Broadway.”

We walk up and down the length of Main Street with our gear bags and our out-of-place attire. It’s April, and the day is cool and pleasant, a light breeze from the west carrying the nothing-scent of clean air and melting snow from the Green Mountains. It’s not quite as unspoiled as New Svalbard, but it’s the closest thing to it on this continent. No wonder the middle-class people are so protective of their little suburban enclaves, unsullied by the uncouth, unwashed masses from the PRCs. But the people that live here aren’t the elite. If they were, they’d have left with the Exodus fleet last year.

When we get back to Chief Kopka’s restaurant, it’s well past lunch, but the place is still busy. Mom is busing tables, and the chief is in the kitchen, preparing plates and filling orders. He has two waiters who are ferrying meals from the kitchen to the dining room.

“I have the guest room ready for you if you want to lay your heads a bit,” the chief says when we walk into the kitchen.

“Thanks, Chief,” I say. “We won’t take it up longer than we have to. Going back up to Luna in the morning.”

“That soon? Getting bored of fresh air and good coffee already?”

“Not now, not ever,” Halley says. “No, they’re firing the big gun on
Agincourt
at the test range tomorrow, and we have an invite for ringside seats.”

“Very nice,” the chief says, a bit of envy in his voice.

“You got a second?” I ask the chief, and nod toward his office in the back of the kitchen area. “Got something to give you.”

“Sure.” Chief Kopka puts down his bread knife and wipes his hands on a towel hanging from the handle of the heating unit in front of him.

We walk over to the chief’s office, a tiny space just big enough for a chair, a desk with a network terminal, and a few high-mounted shelves with stacks of analog printouts on them. There’s a big security locker underneath the desk, the “armed” light on the biometric lock blinking an unfriendly red.

“Hope you’re not going to try to pay me,” the chief says. He sits down in his chair.

“I’m not paying you.” I close the door behind me and kneel to open the lock on my alarm bag. “I got you a little souvenir from the Fleet.”

“Oh?” He watches as I open my alarm bag and take out a small box. It’s laminate, tough enough to survive a building falling on top of it, and fitted with a separate DNA lock. It’s a portable version of the security locker under the chief’s desk. He raises an eyebrow as I put the box on the desk in front of him.

“Go ahead and open it,” I say. “Lock’s coded to your DNA.”

He puts his thumb into the recess for the DNA reader, and the lock of the box snaps open with a click. The chief opens the lid and takes a look at the contents, and his eyes widen in unconcealed surprise.

“I thought those were all under lock and key,” he says.

“We issue those like new socks now,” I reply. “Everyone’s armed all the time when they leave base. New rule since last year.”

He reaches into the box and pulls out a standard-issue M109 pistol. With practiced hands, he releases the disposable magazine block and checks the chamber of the weapon to verify that it’s not loaded. Then he aims it at the floor of the office, away from me, and pulls the trigger to check for function. The electronic firing module emits a sharp click that would have been a loud bang if there had been a round in the chamber.

“It’s coded to you. Well, to me as well because I signed it out. Technically, I am just staging it here for emergencies. Plus seven full magazines.”

“How the hell did you get my DNA profile for the lock?” the chief asks.

“I know a guy in Neural who was in tech school with me,” I say. “He got your profile from your old Navy personnel file and copied it to the lock when I signed out the gun.”

“Pretty sure that’s very much against the regulations,” the chief says.

“Pretty sure I very much don’t give a shit,” I reply, and he flashes a grin without taking his eyes off the weapon.

“Keep that in your security locker,” I say. “Don’t get it out unless there’s a major emergency. But if you do get it out, you make those shots count. Protect yourself. And your family. And my mom. You keep them safe. Whatever it takes.”

Chief Kopka nods solemnly.

“It’s not a fléchette rifle or a rocket launcher,” I say. “It won’t do much good against a Lanky or someone wearing hardshell battle armor.”

“It’ll work a lot better than the dumb little stun gun I have in that desk drawer,” he says. “And it ain’t the Lankies I’m worried about.”

Halley and I spend the afternoon in Chief Kopka’s guest room above the restaurant. We hear the din of conversations and clattering silverware from below on occasion as we make ourselves comfortable on the not-quite-big-enough bed in the room and watch Network shows with half an eye as we talk. Sometime around dinner, there’s a knock on the door, and the chief brings in two plates with bread and cheese and an almost-full bottle of wine, along with two glasses.

I love spending time with my wife, sharing food with her and making her laugh. I love our unhurried lovemaking, enjoying the act without having to worry about unwelcome visitors knocking on the hatch or overhead announcements in the hallway outside interrupting us. I love the sense that we are home for each other—that it’s not a fixed place on Earth or anyplace else you can find on a map, but where we both happen to be together.

But right now, most of all I love knowing that she’ll be next to me when I fall asleep, and she’ll be there still when I wake up in the morning. It means that I can go to sleep without dreading the shitty dreams that usually come in the middle of the night when I am alone.

CHAPTER 6

I haven’t been on a Treaty-class frigate in at least half a decade. When Halley and I step out of the drop ship and onto the scuffed and worn flight deck of NACS
Berlin
, it feels like I just went back in time.
Berlin
is one of the sister ships of my first Navy assignment, NACS
Versailles
, which went down over the far-off colony of Willoughby seven years ago, the first ship lost to the Lankies.

“Blast from the past,” Halley says as we get our bearings and look around. The drop ship we just arrived in is the only bird on the deck. “I didn’t think there were any Treaty figs left.”

“They must have put a few in mothballs,” I say. “I know
Hidalgo
ate it over Mars. I saw her beacon on the tac screen when we passed.”

We salute the colors on the aft bulkhead of the deck, a faded painting of the NAC flag above an equally faded ship’s seal. NACS BERLIN FF-480: FREEDOM’S DEFENSE. Then Halley, as the ranking visitor, asks the OOD for permission to come aboard.

“The skipper said to send you up to CIC,” the officer of the deck says when we have completed the traditional formalities. “Starboard gangway, to the main intersection.”

“Central elevator to Charlie Deck,” Halley says. “Thank you, Sergeant.”

“This takes me back,” I say out in the gangway. “Not sure it’s in a good way.”

“Yeah, last time we were on a Treaty class, things ended up with a lot of running and shouting.”

“And near-death experiences.”

“I liked
Versailles
,” she says. “And not just because that was the only command we ever got to serve on together.”

“You liked that relic?”

“Yeah, I did. It was my first ship assignment after Combat Flight School. And the flight ops were tiny. One drop ship and a spare. Three pilots on the whole ship. I was a big fish in a small tank.”

“And
Versailles
had a great XO,” I say.

“The best,” Halley confirms.

We walk up the central elevator and take it up to Charlie Deck, the central command deck on Treaty-class frigates. It houses the heavily armored combat information center right in the middle of the ship, where it’s most protected against battle damage. Seven years ago, I reported to her sister ship for my first assignment after tech school and promptly got an ass-chewing from then-Commander Campbell, who was the ship’s executive officer at the time. I smile at the memory as we step out of the elevator and onto Charlie Deck. He was wrong, and he apologized immediately when he realized his mistake, and that told me all I needed to know about my new XO.

Berlin
looks tired and worn-out. The Treaty figs were in service for fifty years before they started decommissioning them, and this ship looks like it has been ridden hard for most of those five decades. The armored vestibule housing the CIC is painted the regulation Fleet gray, but the paint is scuffed and cracked in many places, and the polyplast of the CIC windows is a bit milky from all the surface wear over the years. We walk up to the SI trooper guarding the hatch and report in. He checks with CIC via an ancient hardwired comms handset, then opens the armored hatch for us and steps aside to let us enter.

Lieutenant Colonel Renner, the ship’s commanding officer, stands at the holotable in the pit that makes up the center of the CIC. She looks up when we enter, and I see the tiniest of smiles in the corners of her mouth. She’s almost a head shorter than Halley, with sand-colored hair she wears in a much closer crop than she used to have when I knew her on
Indy
. There are more obvious gray hairs in between the sandy ones now, and her face has more lines than it did a year ago.

“Captain Halley and Sergeant First Class Grayson reporting, ma’am,” Halley says, and we both give a proper salute. Despite the weary air about her, Lieutenant Colonel Renner returns it with precision.

“Good to see you, Sergeant Grayson. You too, Captain. Sorry we didn’t get a chance to talk at the ceremony day before yesterday.”

“It wasn’t really a social occasion, ma’am,” I say.

“No, it wasn’t.” She looks past us, toward the armored CIC hatch, as if she’s expecting someone else. Then she shakes her head lightly.

“Are you ready to go watch some fireworks?” she asks.

“Yes, ma’am. Provided that beast actually works as designed.”

“No shit.” Lieutenant Colonel Renner smiles wryly. “From what I hear, it took the engineering division three months just to figure out what all the switches did. Let’s hope we didn’t just piss all that manpower into the wind. Coulda used all those yard apes to get a dozen more cans from the mothball fleet into action.”

“Thank you for the invitation, ma’am. It’s nice to be able to get back up into space again,” I say.

“You’re welcome,” Lieutenant Colonel Renner says. “We have the space, and by God, you’ve earned an occasional VIP pass after last year.” Her expression clouds over briefly.

“Astrogation, plot a course to Perry Spaceborne Warfare Training Range. Let’s get underway so we don’t miss the party. It’s not like we get to see planet-killing weaponry in live fire every day.”

Perry, the Fleet’s main live-fire range, is a few hours from Earth orbit, laid out in space in a direction that points away from all intersystem shipping lanes, settlements, and Alcubierre nodes. Some of the stuff the Fleet slings from capital ship launchers can obliterate a deep-space transport or wipe out a settlement if it hits the wrong point in space.

Berlin
burns her engines at military power for two hours, then flips for the turnaround burn in the opposite direction. There are several ships in the transit lane in front and behind us, all following the same precise routine. Space travel is nothing like the stuff I watched as a kid on the Networks—ships accelerating and braking on the spot in zero gravity, space fighters banking like airplanes. In reality, it’s a lot like trying to stop on a ten-centimeter bull’s-eye on a frozen lake precisely from half a kilometer away while on ice skates.

Lieutenant Colonel Renner makes some small talk with us in the CIC as
Berlin
’s icon moves along her computed plot trajectory on the holotable, but she’s not quite the same person I remember from my weeks on
Indianapolis
last year. She has never been chatty, but now she’s subdued, as if there’s a permanent storm cloud living behind those brown eyes now. The CO is perfectly courteous to us, but she keeps the chatter to the barest minimum, and she doesn’t bring up the events of last year again after her brief comment to me when we entered the CIC.

“Entering staging point,” the helmsman announces when
Berlin
has reached the last tenth of the trajectory line on the holotable’s display. “Deceleration complete. Coasting at ten meters per second.”

“Contact Perry Control and have them slot us into our gallery spot,” Lieutenant Colonel Renner orders.

“Aye, ma’am.”

I’ve never had the opportunity to watch a live-firing exercise out here. With the distances involved in space warfare, there wouldn’t be much to see without
Berlin
’s optical gear feeding high-magnification imagery to the holotable in the CIC. We move up to the section of space designated as the observation gallery, where half a dozen other ships are already lined up in ten-thousand-meter intervals, a silent audience of fleet-gray hulls, position lights blinking out of sync.

The star of this particular show is out on the range fifty thousand kilometers away. The massive bulk of NACS
Agincourt
is holding position out in the black, her bow pointed away from us, the lights on her hull flashing a steady rhythm. Further into space, at the far end of the three-dimensional wedge of space designated as live-fire zone, there are targets for
Agincourt
’s main gun, a small and forlorn-looking group of old ship hulls. The biggest in the center of the cluster is an old, heavy cruiser, a sizable ship at probably twenty thousand tons. The other ships are smaller—a frigate and a destroyer, and a civilian unit that looks like an ore hauler from the auxiliary fleet.

“Seems a waste to blow up those hulls when we have so few to go around,” I say.

“Those are from the breaker queue,” Lieutenant Colonel Renner says. “They were all a few weeks away from the scrapyard. They already stripped out everything worth reusing. We couldn’t recommission those if we wanted to.”

“Look,” Halley says and points to one of the icons on the holographic display. “That’s an SRA can.”

The icon she points out has the marker SRAS HANOI next to it. The color of the ship icon isn’t the customary red we used for SRA contacts until very recently, but the pale blue of a foreign but allied friendly unit.

“One happy human family,” Lieutenant Colonel Renner remarks, the irony in her voice more than a little thick.

“Something like that,” I say.

“The Russians are mostly all right. The Chinese are hard to figure out. They never give you a direct answer to anything, not even when you just ask them for directions to the head.” Colonel Renner shrugs. “Doesn’t matter much, as long as they help us kill Lankies.”

The line of ships on the holotable orb grows steadily longer over the next ninety minutes as more ships arrive in the gallery section of the firing range and take their holding pattern slots to get a good view of the action. Under normal circumstances, a live-fire weapon test would be an unremarkable routine event, but the stuff that usually goes downrange at Perry consists of light rail gun projectiles or ship-to-ship missiles with half-ton warheads, not plasma bursts moving at near light-speed velocity. The main dorsal cannon on
Agincourt
is by far the most powerful armament ever put on a warship, and the assembled crowd of observers is hoping for some spectacular footage for their data storage modules.

“Red flag, red flag. Range is hot. I repeat, range is hot,” Perry Control announces over the general comms channel. “All ships, hold positions as assigned. Live-fire test commencing in t-minus ten minutes. Level Two radiation protocol is in effect.”

“Here we go,” Halley says. “This thing better be the freaking Hammer of Thor.”

“I concur,” Lieutenant Colonel Renner says. “’Cause if it isn’t, we’ve wasted a whole lot of scarce resources on a light show.”

For something as theoretically exciting as the first test of a city-killer weapon, watching the huge battleship getting ready for the shot is about as exciting as watching paint dry. The
Agincourt
and Perry Control are in a constant chatter involving directional instructions, reactor output levels, and arming procedures. Then the engineering crew members on
Agincourt
are satisfied that all the lights and gauges on the dash look right, and a simulated range horn blast comes over the general comms channel.

“Tracking target, range 125,000 kilometers,” the weapons officer on
Agincourt
transmits. “Target locked at point five meters per second, good lock.”

“Reactor to pulse afterburner.”

“Reactor is at pulse afterburner, output steady.”