Chains of Command (3 page)

In theory, I remind myself. We’ve tested the new rounds on Lanky corpses, but we haven’t had a chance to use them in combat yet. It’s all conjecture based on dead-meat terminal ballistics, but the gas rounds make an unholy mess out of a dead Lanky, and I have no reason to believe they won’t ruin the day of a live one.

The troops on the roof are still in the middle of their self-congratulatory
cheer when I send in the next wave. The cheering ebbs when they hear the thundering footsteps in the fog and mist in the distance. Again, I am cheating a little. When I lived through this scenario in real life over six years ago, the second wave was made up of three more Lankies. We had just a squad then, with fléchette rifles, and no hope of stopping three of those things from tearing up the terraformer. Because these troops are a full platoon with much better rifles, I send in not three, but six more Lankies. Let them have a little challenge.

The squad leaders bellow orders again, and the platoon engages the newcomers. I study the camera feeds and the tactical display as they re-form their line and assign fire teams to individual Lankies, just like they should. Two fire teams per squad, three squads per platoon, four rifles per Lanky, five rounds in each rifle between reloads. I’m having the Lankies cross the distance as fast as we know they can move, a kilometer per minute. That doesn’t leave much room for errors on the part of the platoon. Alerted and ready for trouble, the Lankies advance with their cranial shields in front of them, and they bob and weave as if they are walking into a hailstorm as the platoon unloads on them. Their head shields are too tough for anything man-portable in our arsenal—even armor-piercing MARS rockets will just chip off bits—and most of the rifle rounds expend themselves harmlessly in small puffs of aerosolizing gas.

“Aim for the joints,” Sergeant Fisher yells into his squad channel. The recruits shift their fire, but many of the shots miss the relatively much smaller limb joints of the Lanky bodies.

Not as easy as a static target that doesn’t come charging for you, is it?
I think and smile to myself. Every last one of these recruits can pot a target the size of a helmet at five hundred meters with those computerized rifles, but it’s much harder to aim true when you’re scared to death and out of breath.

The Lankies advance into the rifle fire, heads bowed, rounds shattering against their shields, fragments kicking up dust in the dirt beneath their three-toed feet. The closer they get to the terraformer, the more precise the rifle fire from the three squads becomes. At two hundred meters, one of the Lankies falls with a wail and doesn’t get back up, its leg joints destroyed by half a dozen exploding gas rounds. At one hundred meters, another goes down, flailing and screaming. A third one falls a mere fifty meters from the terraformer. The other three are at the building a second or two later. Two of them just crash into the wall, sending simulated debris flying everywhere. The third hooks its fingers into the edge of the roof and pulls itself up. The squads retreat away from the Lanky, still firing in good order, but they started their pullback just a second or two too late. Lankies can move much faster than their size and awkward physiology suggests. The Lanky lashes out with a spindly arm and almost casually wipes it across the front occupied by Second Squad. Six of their ten icons on my tactical display are snuffed out as the Lanky strikes a simulated killing blow that takes out over half the squad in a second or two. The Lanky exists only in the computer, of course, so the “dead” troopers didn’t get most of their bones broken by a million joules of impact energy. Instead, their suit computers just turn off their optical and audio feeds, lock their visors in the lowered position to render their owners blind and deaf, and freeze the power-assisted joints on their battle armor suits. The six “dead” recruits fall where they died a simulated death, and they’ll stay in that spot until I tell the computer to unfreeze them.

The rest of the platoon do a cover-and-retreat drill, rushing back across the expanse of the roof until they reach the single access door to the interior of the terraforming station. At this short range, the rifle fire from the M-90s is a devastating fusillade, and while most of the gas rounds hit the Lanky’s impenetrable cranial shield, some make their way past it and blow bits and pieces off the limbs. Three or four rounds hit the upper chest of the Lanky nearly simultaneously and explode, and the Lanky lets out an earsplitting wail and slides off the roof again, mortally wounded. Then the computer decides that the other two Lankies have done enough structural damage to the building to make the front of it collapse. Half the platoon is inside the building, in the hardened staircase, but the other half is still on the roof that suddenly acquires a seventy-degree downward pitch, and a dozen more icons blink out of existence on the tactical display as the computer declares their owners casualties.

The sim is almost perfect. The sensory details are dead-on—the Lanky wails and the thundering sounds of their footsteps, the leaden sky above, the rain squalls and thick mists of a Lanky-occupied world. I have no doubt that the recruits feel as if they really are on a colony world, fighting the good fight for humanity. But it’s only almost perfect. I’ve been in this scenario for real many times, and I know what’s missing from the sim. As real as the computer can make it for the recruits, turning the Utah desert into a far-off Lanky world without breaking a computational sweat, deep down they all know they’re not in real peril. They don’t look up at that ash-gray sky with the knowledge that home is thirty light-years away, and that they are the only humans in the entire star system, the nearest members of their own species a dozen light-years away. They don’t have the cold knowledge in the back of their heads that if the battle goes wrong, nobody will ever be around to collect dog tags, or even know about their deaths, for maybe decades, if at all.

The remaining squads do their best to regain control of the situation. First Squad moves down to the shelter of the basement and out to the emergency exit on the east side of the terraformer. Third Squad retreats to the back of the building and calls in for air support from the imaginary carrier in orbit. I decide to complicate things for the platoon.

“Charlie One-Niner, negative on the air support. All assets committed.”

Third Squad’s sergeant curses into the squad channel and toggles back a reply.

“Copy that,
Enterprise
TacOps. Requesting kinetic strike on marked coordinates, low yield.”

I think about the request for a moment and consider denying that one as well, but then I decide that I’ve thrown this boot squad enough curveballs today. It won’t be a complete freebie, however.

“Charlie One-Niner,
Enterprise
sensor array has battle damage. Give me a ten-second marker on the target and upload TRP data, and I’ll send two kinetics your way.”

“TacOps, copy that. Stand by for TRP data.”

I asked for manual target markers, which means that someone has to go out and lay eyes and helmet sensors on the gaggle of Lankies disassembling the station from the outside.

On the tactical display, one fire team from Third Squad leaves the building via the emergency door all the way in the back of the terraforming station, on the opposite end of the part the Lankies are tearing down. I grin when I see that the icons are moving at a much faster speed than a soldier in battle armor can move on foot. The mock-up of the station is built like the real thing, including a pair of all-terrain electric all-wheel crawlers intended for maintenance patrols around the facility. I switch over to the visual feed and see two troopers on each crawler—one in the driver’s seat, and one riding shotgun behind him facing to the rear. Only these troops aren’t precisely riding shotgun.

The crawlers speed up as they drive up the long side of the building. At about the halfway point, they veer off into the desert, making wide hooks around the far corners to avoid close contact with the Lankies. Then they fire up their helmet-mounted designators and put target markers right into the middle of the group of Lankies dismantling the front of the building.

“TacOps, TRP data uploading.”

“Charlie One-Niner, copy good data,” I reply. “Stand by for kinetic launch in seven-zero seconds and clear the target area.”

The Lankies can sense our vehicles somehow. Anything with an electric motor or fusion plant draws their attention much faster than just a trooper or two in battle armor. Two of the Lankies notice the four-wheeled crawlers and stop what they are doing to pursue the all-terrain vehicles in strides that are slow at first, then longer and faster as the aliens get their enormous mass moving. The drivers of the crawlers goose their electric engine and shoot off into the desert, and even at full throttle, they are barely pulling away from the Lankies. The two rear-facing troops on the passenger seats empty the magazines of their rifles at the pursuers. On a small vehicle going at top speed over rough and bumpy terrain, even the aiming computer isn’t a great deal of help. Most of their rounds go wide or kick up dust in front or beside the Lankies. Then two or three rounds hit the lead Lanky, whose lower left limb collapses midstride. The Lanky tumbles to the desert floor in an enormous cloud of dust and gravel.

For a bunch of boots, it’s a pretty good plan, and capable execution. It only has one flaw—it makes the Lankies disperse. The two that followed the ATVs are now away from the impact marker for the kinetic strike. When the rail gun projectile from the simulated carrier
Enterprise
hits the dirt right in front of the terraforming station a minute later, the quarter-kiloton impact blows apart the ruined front of the station and the two Lankies that were still working their way through the wreckage. The remaining Lanky, in hot pursuit of the two ATVs, stops and turns around. It’s over five hundred meters away from the station now and cleanly avoided the kinetic impact altogether. The two crawlers stop their flight, and the riflemen on the backs of the ATVs reload their weapons. Then First Squad come out of the safety of the basement hallway shelter and takes up firing positions on the east flank of the building. The Lanky acts as if it can’t make up its mind where to go next. It’s about to find out what it feels like to be stuck between a hammer and an anvil. The ATV teams goose their rides again and swing around wide, and then the remaining Lanky takes rifle fire from three different directions. I watch with satisfaction as their concentrated fire tears into the Lanky, felling it like an enormous alien equivalent of an ancient Earth redwood tree.

When the dust settles, the platoon has lost eighteen out of thirty-three, more than half its number, but it has taken out all six of the attacking Lankies. The terraformer they were supposed to defend is half gone—in the simulation on their helmet visors, of course, not in reality—but I wasn’t counting on the building surviving the defense, so I don’t subtract any marks for that on the simulation score for the platoon. In the field, for a seasoned platoon of SI, this would have been a near defeat, with half the platoon gone and the facility destroyed. But these are recruits, not even fully trained soldiers yet, and only eleven weeks out of utter civiliandom. All things considered, they did well, but I do have to wonder how many of them I consign to a violent and perfectly unsimulated death on a colony world somewhere by letting this platoon pass their basic training.

The vital signs from the platoon are good, and a lot of them are elated at their victory. No doubt they anticipate this to be the end of their graduation exercise, but it’s only the beginning.

“Squad leaders, gather your squads and prepare for egress,” I send through the platoon channel. I unfreeze the “dead” soldiers’ armor joints. Then I update TacLink with the coordinates for their next waypoint, which isn’t the parking spot for the bus that dropped them off. It’s the parking lot in front of the platoon building at NACRD Orem, forty kilometers to the northeast.

I smile when I hear the groans and muttered curses over the various squad channels. I’ve been in their shoes, and I’ve hated my drill sergeants as much as these recruits hate me right now. But the settled galaxy holds much bigger hardships than a surprise forty-klick hike in battle rattle, and I wouldn’t be doing them any favors by going easy on them and making them believe otherwise. They’ll be out in the field for the whole week, and they’ll hate most of it, but they’ll be better soldiers for it. And maybe they’ll live long enough to appreciate it one day.

CHAPTER 3

On graduation day, the weather is as lousy as our odds against the Lankies. Instead of a big dog-and-pony ceremony out on the central parade ground, we have an abbreviated graduation indoors, in one of the massive vehicle hangars. Every surviving member of the platoon has passed Basic training, which is not like the boot camp I knew. For the ceremony, we actually have visiting families for an audience, which is definitely nothing like the old boot camp. We have a short formation and a long speech from the training battalion commander, and I’m next to the platoon leader in my drill instructor getup, trying to look impressive and soldierly while struggling with the mighty hangover caused by last night’s end-of-training instructor party.

“I solemnly swear and affirm to loyally serve the North American Commonwealth, and to bravely defend its laws and the freedom of its citizens.”

The recruits repeat the oath of service in loud and clear voices that reverberate through the cavernous hangar. They all look like they mean it. I said the same oath over six years ago, and then again last year for my reenlistment. I suppose I must have meant it, too, back then, because I am still here and wearing the uniform, despite everything that has happened since.

“Welcome to the Armed Forces of the North American Commonwealth,” the battalion commander says, and the recruits and their families cheer. My drill instructors, standing at parade rest in front of their squads, stay straight-faced as only drill sergeants can.

“Platoon sergeants, take charge of your platoons and dismiss for liberty.”

I step forward, toward the platoon, and my drill sergeants stand at attention.

“Ten-hut!”

The platoon follows suit with practiced precision. They may not be worth anything as infantry yet, but three months of daily formation drills have made them look like soldiers at least.

“Basic Training Platoon 1526—well done,” I say in my platoon sergeant voice. “Drinks tonight will be on the house. Enjoy your leave, soldiers. You’ve earned it. Platoon dis-
missed
.”

I watch as the formation dissolves, and the recruits of Platoon 1526—no longer rank civilians, but not yet fully trained and useful troops—rush over to where their families are waiting. About a third of them just mill around in place and talk to each other, recruits whose families couldn’t make the trip or didn’t want to. The image of the new and reformed post-Exodus military has greatly improved in the year since the Battle of Earth, but there are still plenty of people who think of the armed forces as tools of oppression, jailers and wardens of a vast coast-to-coast prison system. As a former PRC hood rat, and knowing the extent of the old leadership’s cowardice and treason, I can’t really say I blame the people who still hate the military.

My three drill instructors come over to join me, and we walk toward the gaggle of recruits and civilian families together, to shake hands and answer questions for a while and let the civvies take pictures of their loved ones shaking hands with their drill sergeants.

“Thirty minutes,” I tell my sergeants. “Then nudge them toward the buses. Open house at the platoon building for an hour. We’ll do unit assignments after midday chow.”

“Copy that,” Sergeant Lear replies. “And then I’ll need a goddamn drink.”

I look over the crowd of intermingling recruits and their families and wonder how soon I’ll find some of those names on casualty reports through MilNet.

“You and me both,” I say.

In the late afternoon, when all the former recruits are off to enjoy their weeklong post-graduation leave, I’m back in my office, closing out records and signing off on branch assignments. As in the past two training cycles, the ratio is 40/40/20 for Fleet, Spaceborne Infantry, and Homeworld Defense. We have lots of warships out of mothballs that need to be crewed, and lots of SI regiments to fill up with warm bodies after the Mars debacle. With the Lazarus Brigades doing most of the heavy lifting keeping order in the PRCs, there’s less of a need for HD, so they get just maintenance-level personnel for now.

My finely honed combat vet senses don’t even notice Sergeant Lear in the door until she clears her throat. I look up from my screen.

“I thought you were on leave already, Lear. Didn’t think anyone was left but me.”

“It’s a three-shuttle hop to Montana,” she says. “If I leave midday, I’ll be stuck in some transit quarters shithole for the night. I’ll be out with the first bird from Salt Lake in the morning.”

“Yeah, transit bunks suck.”

I look at her expectantly, but she doesn’t walk into the office to sit in the empty chair in front of my desk.

“So what is it?” I say. “Did you come to secure yourself an instructor slot in boot camp flight 1601?”

Sergeant Lear shakes her head with a curt smile.

“Not at all. You, uh, want to maybe get a drink over at the NCO club if you’re not too busy? It’s past 1700 hours.”

“Right,” I say. 1700 is the magic hour when they start serving alcohol, or at least what passes for it at a military facility in a cash-strapped country. When I signed up, the food perks were a major incentive to stick it out through boot camp, but now that the military can’t be as selective anymore, the culinary standards have dropped a little, to say the least.

I look back at my screen, where half a dozen Basic training personnel assignments still wait for my electronic signature. I can blow them off, but then I’ll have to start this boring process again in the morning, possibly with a hangover.

“Why don’t you go ahead and grab us a table, Sergeant Lear? I’ll need another ten minutes on this admin bullshit. I’ll join you when I’m done.”

“Copy that,” she says. Then she pats the doorframe and walks off. I listen to the sound of her boot soles on the worn but spotless flooring as she makes her way down the hallway.

“Right,” I say again, and turn my attention back to the screen with some effort of will.

When I walk up to Sergeant Lear’s table in the NCO club a little while later, she already has two bottles of beer waiting. I sit down across the table from her and pop the cap off my bottle. She watches as I take a swig.

“Thanks. I needed that after today.”

“Not much for fashion shows, huh?” Lear asks.

“Not much for bullshit,” I reply, and she laughs.

“You think it’s all bullshit?”

“The training? No. ’Course not. Just sending these green kids out into the force like that. Giving them the idea that they know shit about shit. The time we have, we can barely teach them how not to be a danger to others. Graduating from boot camp with a fucking parade. And families applauding. That shit just makes them feel like they’re warriors now.”

“They did okay,” Sergeant Lear says. “You know what kind of material we get these days from the PRCs. Most of them would have failed boot before the Exodus just for attitude. But there are some tough kids in every batch.”

“Tough,” I repeat. “For PRC standards, no doubt. One thing to know how to take a punch and jack a hydrocar. It’s another level of tough altogether to keep yourself in the fight when you’re down to ten percent oxygen and three MARS rockets, and there’s half a dozen Lankies coming to stomp you into the fucking dirt.”

Sergeant Lear shifts in her seat a little and looks at the label on her beer bottle. Then she clears her throat and looks at me again.

“Sergeant Grayson, I wanted to ask you for a favor. I was wondering if you could give me a recommendation for my transfer request.”

“You put in for transfer? What do you have, three tours as drill instructor now?”

“This was number four,” she says. “Been at it for a year straight. I’m up for staff sergeant after this flight.”

“Senior drill instructor slot,” I say. “But that’s not what you want.”

She shakes her head and takes another sip from her bottle.

“Don’t tell me you put in for a transfer to a combat billet, Lear.”

I take her shrug as an affirmative response.

“Shit,” I say. “Thought you were the smart one. You want to go back into the Fleet right now? Shipboard duty? You’re MP, right?”

Sergeant Lear nods. “Master-at-arms.”

“Are you out of your mind? You know how many ships we’ve lost in the last year and a half?”

“Most of the Fleet,” she says.

“Most of the Fleet,” I repeat. “And that includes almost all the good hardware. They’re dragging fifty-year-old frigates out of mothballs and reactivating them with reserve crews and new sailors that have never done an Alcubierre transition. And they need all the atomic warheads for the Orion missiles, so most of the old shit buckets have empty missile tubes right now. You want to trade the fresh air and the weekends off for standing watch in a leaky relic that makes figure eights in orbit just to reassure the civvies on the ground?”

“That’s my job,” she says. “It’s what I trained for. Not this drill instructor stuff. I’m happy standing watch in a leaky relic. I’m a Fleet sailor. I’ve done my time on the ground in the fresh air. And home’s too far for two-day leave anyway, so I just sit here in the NCO club or ride out to Salt Lake on the weekends. I’m bored absolutely shitless.”

I chuckle, and she raises an eyebrow.

“Now that last part I believe,” I say. “You being bored. Not the soymeal paste about you rather being up there than down here. Nobody in their right mind likes watch rotation on a ship over weekends off and eight hours of uninterrupted sleep every night.”

Sergeant Lear shrugs again, but this time with a slight smile.

“You got me there. But don’t you feel the same? I mean, don’t you itch to get back in the field again sometimes? Knowing that it can all turn to shit in a moment if you don’t do your job right?”

I glance at my beer bottle, and my left hand that is idly turning it with just the fingertips. The prosthetics docs at Great Lakes were able to make my hand look like a proper hand again, but the time after our dash back to New Svalbard had been too long, and the damage from the contact salvo too great. The little and ring fingers on my left hand move with the impulses my brain sends over the artificial nerve conduits, and they bend and flex like their biological counterparts, but I have no feeling in them whatsoever other than a coarse sense of temperature and pressure. The replacement is extremely well done, but I can still tell the transition between the real, living part of the hand and the artificial addition. The skin has the same tone and texture, but something about it is just slightly off, and always will be.

“No,” I say, and continue to turn the beer bottle. “I don’t itch for that. Not anymore.”

There’s something in Sergeant Lear’s expression that almost looks like pity for a moment. Then she lets out a slow breath and leans back in her chair.

“Maybe you’re right. Maybe I’m nuts for wanting to go combat again. But I’m tired of this place. Another six months of this, and I’ll be a raging alcoholic.”

“You can’t,” I say, and lift the bottle off the table a few centimeters. “Not with this shit. Trust me on that one.”

I look at Sergeant Lear, and I’m once again struck by how young she is. Not really in the chronological sense—I only have five years on her at the most—but in appearance. She’s had four years of service, but she’s in a support specialty, not a frontline combat job. She looks tired, but so do all the other instructors after another twelve-week boot camp training flight of getting up at 0400, going to bed at 2200 or later, and lots of physical and mental stress in between. But she lacks the shopworn look of the grunts. She doesn’t have early gray hairs interleaved in that tightly strung ponytail of hers. She doesn’t have the wrinkles in the corner of her eyes. And she doesn’t have that hallmark of men and women who have seen too much awful stuff, the thousand-yard stare. She doesn’t look weary.