Terms of Enlistment (40 page)

Above our heads, the sounds of steady demolition have ceased. As my hearing gradually returns to normal, I can hear the Marines coughing and cursing in the next room, and the faint roar of the assault ships’ engines overhead. The low drone from the environmental system is gone, and the comms station has gone silent as well.

“Backup power’s out,” one of the civilian techs says.

“No shit,” one of the Marines replies.

“Open that hatch, or we’ll all suffocate. All we have left is the air in the room.”

“Check the other side first,” I caution, remembering our troubles getting out of the NNC on the Versailles. “You got a fire in that corridor, we’ll suffocate right now instead.”

“Hold up,” Halley interjects from behind me. “There’s a shitload of NIFTIs on the shelf over here. I wonder if they’re still any good?”

The civilian emergency rebreathers aren’t quite as sophisticated as the NIFTIs on Navy ships. The civilian versions are little masks with built-in oxygen supplies and filters, but they lack the thermal imaging component of their military counterparts. Halley and I start passing the sealed emergency packs out into the main room, and for once, we have enough essential gear for everyone. We all don our masks, and prepare for egress. When Sergeant Becker opens the shelter’s hatch, I duck behind the Marine in front of me, but nothing dramatic happens. The first group of Marines swarms out into the dark corridor beyond, and we get the all-clear only moments later.

“No fires. We’re good to go.”

We file out of the room behind the Marines. The corridor is only sparsely lit by a few hand-held lights. The Marines can see in the dark with their helmet-mounted sensors, but the rest of us are all but blind, and we follow the Marines cautiously, stumbling over bits of concrete in the dark.

After what seems like a fifteen-minute procession through rubble-filled basement corridors, we reach a set of double steel doors. The Marines signal for us to stand back, and open the doors in textbook urban combat fashion, one fire team providing cover as the second team goes through. As soon as the double doors swing open, daylight comes flooding into the basement hallway, and we shield our eyes against the sudden brightness. The Marines file out of the corridor and through the open door in pairs, rifles at the ready.

“Holy shit,” we hear from above.

“What’s the word, Sarge?” Commander Campbell demands.

“It’s clear, sir, but mind your step. Lots of broken stuff everywhere.”

“Any sign of our friends?”

“Well,” Sergeant Becker says, and pauses briefly. “Sort of. It’s hard to tell, really.”

There’s a staircase beyond the double doors that leads up to the surface. To the right of the stairs, there’s a ramp for vehicles, too steep to walk up even if it wasn’t littered with broken metal and concrete. We walk up the stairs and into the light of the local morning sun.

The destruction on the surface is breathtaking. I turn around at the top of the steps to look back at the building, only to find that there’s no structure left on this end of the station. The Shrikes didn’t drop tactical nukes, but whatever they used did a number on this facility. There are steel girders and chunks of concrete strewn as far as I can see. What was once the front third of the terraforming station Willoughby Four-Seven is just a pile of smoking rubble now. A hundred yards away, part of the remaining building has collapsed, the floors pancaked into each other like the layers in a sloppily made sandwich. A multitude of fires are pouring dark smoke into the dark and rainy morning sky.

“‘Holy shit’ is right,” Commander Campbell says in an awed voice when he surveys the utter devastation. “This place is officially off the grid now.”

“They blew up my ride,” Halley says.

To our right, there’s only a barren, smoldering patch of ground where the administration building and the landing pad used to be. I can see smoking bits and pieces of what may have been a drop ship once, scattered over a wide area in front of the destroyed station.

“Fuel-air munitions,” Lieutenant Benning suggests.

“Anyone got the flyboys on comms?” the XO asks.

“Uh, that’s a negative, sir. The comms went out when those bombs hit. Marine field comms are a different band,” Sergeant Becker replies. “We’re down to bedsheets and smoke signals if we want to talk to the Navy again.”

“Where’d our new friends go?” Halley asks, shielding her eyes as she scans the area.

“I think that’s one of them over there,” one of the civilian techs says. He points to the partially collapsed section of the building, where something large and tan-colored is buried under a pile of burning rubble. “Part of it, anyway.”

“Where’s the one we dropped? The one that went down right in front of the building?”

I look over to the spot where the edge of the building would have been just a few minutes ago. When we abandoned our fighting positions on the roof, there was a motionless creature splayed out in front of the admin building, not a hundred yards away from the station, but now I don’t see anything bigger than a mess table in that area.

“Damn,” I tell Halley. “Those attack jocks don’t fuck around, do they?”

A few moments later, the Shrikes appear in the cloudy sky above the ruined station again. Without radio contact, we can’t tell them where we are, and for a very uncomfortable moment, I’m convinced that we’re in the middle of another bombing run. Instead of releasing ordnance, however, the two Shrikes just buzz the site at low altitude and waggle the tips of their stubby wings as they pass us overhead.

I walk over to a large chunk of concrete, sit down on it, and feel a sudden urge to just lie down in the wet dirt altogether. Halley walks up next to me and sits down with a grunt, not even bothering to use something solid as a makeshift seat.

“I have had my fucking fill of near-death experiences today,” she says.

All around us, the wind blows flaming debris around. The air is acrid with the smell of burning stuff, and no matter where I look, the ground is covered with bits and pieces of the building that was our shelter and fighting position just ten minutes ago.

“I hope this counts as a defeat,” I say to Halley. “Because if this is a victory, I’d really hate to see what it looks like when we get our asses kicked.”

The Navy comes prepared for once. The two drop ships that descend out of the rain-heavy clouds thirty minutes later are loaded to the wingtips with air-to-ground ordnance pods. The Shrikes circle overhead as the drop ships land on the ground in front of the ruins of Willoughby Four-Seven. When the tail ramps of the drop ships lower onto the muddy ground, each ship disgorges a full squad of Marines in sealed battle armor.

“Glad to see you people,” Commander Campbell tells the lead Marine when they reach our ragged and tired group of survivors. “It’s getting a little unfriendly down here.”

“So we’ve heard,” the Marine says. Because his suit is sealed, his voice is projected through the speaker in his helmet, and he sounds disconcertingly artificial as a result. “Had a bit of trouble with the new neighbors, I see.”

We trot to the waiting drop ships while the newly arrived Marines bring up the rear. When I walk up the ramp of the closest Wasp, I see that the hatch to the cockpit is closed, and that the crew chief standing by the ramp controls is in full ChemWar gear as well.

The pilots of the drop ships do not waste any time with sight-seeing. As soon as our ragtag mix of civilians, Marines, and Navy stragglers is distributed onto the two Wasps, the pilots gun the engines and get the ships airborne before the rear cargo hatches have closed all the way.

“You pick up any more of my people?” the Commander asks the Marine team leader seated on the bench across the aisle from him. The Marine shakes his head.

“Not us, sir. But there’s SAR flights in the air all over this place. They sent down just about every drop ship in the battle group, I think.”

“What do we have up in orbit?”

“Carrier Battle Group Sixty-Three, sir. The Manitoba, two cruisers, two destroyers, and a frigate.”

“Hot damn,” the Commander says. “That’s a lot of tonnage to send our way.”

“We were in the neighborhood, I guess. Live-fire exercise out by Deimos. We were supposed to practice zero-G assaults, but then your buoy popped out of Alcubierre and started wailing.”

“Sorry about spoiling your exercise,” the Commander says, and the Marine chuckles.

“Not at all, sir. A combat drop beats exercise every time. Three more drops, and I get to pin on the Master drop badge.”

Now it’s the Commander’s turn to chuckle.

“The way things are going right now, I think you Marines are going to get your fill of combat drops soon enough, son.”

The Wasp has no windows back in the cargo hold, but I can tell when we leave the atmosphere of Willoughby when my body pulls against the lap belt of my seat. We hear the engine noises changing as the drop ship transitions to spaceflight and climbs into orbit to meet up with the carrier.

The sensations of forward motion and weight return when we enter the artificial gravity field of the assault carrier. I’ve never been in a drop ship that docked with something floating in space, and I expect something similar to the shuttle docking procedure when I arrived for Fleet School on Luna, but the skids of the drop ship simply touch down on a hard surface. Then we’re in motion again, this time being lowered on the platform of a large elevator.

When the cargo ramp lowers, there’s a welcoming committee waiting for us. The flight deck of the assault carrier is cavernous compared to the two-ship affair on the Versailles. I see rows of drop ships and Shrikes, and the flight deck is abuzz with activity, crews in color-coded shirts fueling and arming the craft parked on the deck. The section where our ships set down is walled off from the rest of the flight deck with a transparent barrier of flexible polymer, and there’s a decontamination tent set up not too far away.

“Well, I
was
looking forward to a good shower,” Halley says dryly when she sees the ChemWar team in full protective gear waving us toward the decontamination tent. “Just not in the middle of the damn flight deck, with half the fucking carrier watching.”

We get scrubbed, rinsed, and doused with what seems like a dozen different chemical agents before the ChemWar team lets us put on some fresh uniforms. Even after the decontamination session, the Manitoba’s armed Marine guards keep us segregated from the rest of the crew. We are led into a large room that looks like a hastily cleared storage area, and a dozen medical officers and nurses descend upon us to treat our minor scratches and bruises. When they’re finally convinced that none of us will suddenly grow tentacles and devour the rest of the crew, we’re led into yet another room, this one a briefing lounge big enough to hold a platoon of troops with room to spare. In front of the briefing lectern, there are rolling tables loaded with sandwich trays and beverage pitchers.

As we stand around the food tables, wolfing down sandwiches and draining pitchers of Navy bug juice, a group of officers enters the room. They split us up and take us away for debriefings in smaller rooms. I end up at a table in a corner of one of the hangar’s maintenance sections, with two officers sitting across the table from me. One of them is a Lieutenant Commander with a Spaceborne Warfare badge, and the other is a Lieutenant with Military Intelligence. Despite his lower rank, he’s in charge of the conversation.

I know the military’s dim view on lost and broken equipment, and considering the fact that we just lost a warship worth more than a billion Commonwealth dollars along with all the gear on board, I expect a rather hostile grilling from the MI officer. Instead, the debriefing is almost amiable, without a word of accusation. The officers listen to my version of the events, starting with our drop out of Alcubierre, and ending with the arrival of the rescue drop ships less than an hour ago.

“Any idea what happened to your admin deck?” the MI officer asks when I finish my narrative. I think about it for a moment, and shrug my shoulders in apology.

“I left it next to the cot in the storage room when we got some sleep,” I say. “Down in the admin building next to the terraforming station.”

“That’s a pity,” the MI officer says. “Could have gotten some more intel off of that. The disaster buoy just sort of gave us the synopsis.”

“Well, I can tell you we got shot out of orbit, but I have no idea how it happened. When we got out with the spare drop ship, there was no other ship around, just the Versailles.”

“Wasn’t a ship,” the Lieutenant Commander says. “We came in with all the curb feelers out. Our new friends did some upgrades to the place, and that’s all I can tell you right now.”

“What, like we ran into something? Like an orbital minefield?”

The Fleet officer looks at his MI counterpart.

“Yes,” the Lieutenant says. “Some sort of pods. You get close to one, they just kind of pop open and spray the neighborhood with penetrators. We didn’t catch ‘em at first, because they don’t show on radar, but the Linebacker cruisers took care of the problem.”