Chains of Command (24 page)

A new noise fills the station. It’s the ascending whine of a dual-mode engine going from cold start to operating pressure. The hull of the station shakes a little as the vibrations from whatever the engine is attached to transmit through the steel and alloy. On a table near Gunny Philbrick, a coffee mug starts dancing near the edge of the desk. It falls and bounces on the rubberized floor plates, splashing coffee against Philbrick’s leg armor.

“Blow that hatch open,” Philbrick orders.

“We’ll decompress the rest of the station,” Corporal Giddings says. “Nez has a busted face shield. He can’t seal his armor.”

“Second Squad, get him back to the ship,” I order. “Blackfly One, do you have a visual?”

“Negative. Angle’s all wrong. But someone opened a big hatch over there.”

“Second Squad, get Nez back to the ship now,” I send.

Something akin to an earthquake goes through the framework of the station. The floor shakes so hard that some of the troopers lose their footing and crash against walls or shelves inside the main module. The engines of the drop ship increase their pitch as the pilot tries to keep the Blackfly in formation with the airlock, which makes an unexpected leap sideways and upward with the rest of the station.

“We have a launch,” the pilot says matter-of-factly. “A shuttle just launched from the far pod. Small craft, looks like a Fleet mail bird.”

“Fuck,” I say to myself, loudly.

“He gets past the dark side of this rock, he can transmit our location.”

“I know,” I reply. “Goddammit. Do you have a bead on him?”

“Negative. I’m tied to the airlock and he’s moving away at a ninety-degree angle on my three o’clock. I only have guns.”

“Rogue Actual, Rogue One-Niner,” Corporal Giddings sends over the squad channel. “We’re in the EVA lock with Nez.”

“Lock the hatch,” I order. “Third Squad, secure that airlock now. Blackfly One, tell them to cut thrust immediately and keep radio silence.”

“Attention, renegade Fleet shuttle. Turn off your propulsion and keep your comms cold, or we will shoot you down,” the pilot sends out.

I check the video feed from our starboard hull. The firefly glow of the shuttle’s engine is already a few hundred meters away from the station. Right now, the bulk of the asteroid is preventing him from sending a signal out to whoever’s listening in the inner system, but as soon as he gets clear, he can scream for help as loud as he wants, and there won’t be anything we can do about it at that point.

“Don’t shoot,” the reply comes. “We are unarmed.”

“I don’t give a shit,” the Blackfly’s pilot sends back. “Cut your engine right the hell now.”

“Don’t shoot. We are unarmed.”

“He’s playing for time,” the pilot says to me. “Thirty seconds, and he’ll be in the clear.”

“Third Squad, status,” I shout into the platoon channel.

“Securing airlock. Ten seconds.”

“Hurry the fuck up. Blackfly One, cut yourself loose from the airlock and bring your weapons to bear.”

“I’ll tear the collar off,” he says.

“We’ll do an EVA recovery when the dust settles,” I reply. “Fucking do it.”

“Copy.”

“Airlock secure,” Third Squad sends, and I let out the breath I’ve been holding for the last twenty seconds or so.

“Blackfly One, go.”

The pilot increases thrust and pitches sharply away from the station. On the external video feed, I can see the soft gray tunnel between our own hatch and the station’s airlock stretch, then rip away from the hull around the airlock. The pilot cuts the collar loose from our ship, and it drifts away slowly as the drop ship picks up speed and moves away from the station.

“Twenty seconds until he’s clear. Coming around,” the pilot says.

I toggle comms to the Fleet emergency channel the pilot just used for his own transmission, and address the fleeing shuttle directly.

“Renegade Fleet unit, this is your last warning. Cut propulsion and come about, or we will destroy your ship.”

“Don’t shoot at us, goddammit,” the shuttle’s pilot replies, and now there’s more than a little panic in his voice. “We are unarmed.”

“Speed and direction unchanged,” our pilot says. “Fifteen seconds.”

“Goddammit,” I shout. On the optical feed, I see the shuttle rushing away from us, eager to reach the edge of the signal-blocking rock we are currently circling.

“Call it, Lieutenant,” the pilot says.

If I order him to fire, he’ll wipe out a ship that can’t fight back, and kill several people who aren’t shooting at me or mine right now. If I don’t give the order, they’ll scream down the house and alert the neighborhood, and a whole task force will come looking for us. They may come looking anyway, or they may not even hear the transmission. Too many mays and ifs for life-and-death decisions. And there’s no time to consult with
Portsmouth
or Major Masoud, who wouldn’t reply anyway because the task force is running under radio silence to avoid giving itself away. I have to make that call, and I have to make it right now.

I close my eyes.

“Weapons free,” I say. “Shoot him down.”

“Copy,” the pilot says, with what sounds like genuine regret in his voice. “Engaging.”

“For the love of God, don’t shoot! We are unarm—”

The Blackfly’s forward turret raps out half-second bursts of armor-piercing grenades. They’re meant for ground support use, not space combat, but a shuttle isn’t a tough nut to crack. The burst chews into the tail end of the shuttle and extinguishes the firefly glow of its engine. The plea from the shuttle crew turns into brief, disjointed screams before the transmission ends abruptly when the fuel tank or the engine or maybe both decide to let go. Almost a kilometer away, the shuttle disintegrates soundlessly. The pieces of the wreckage continue on their trajectory, driven by inertia, and quickly disperse in a wide cone of debris and frozen air. I don’t look too closely at the results of my order. I don’t want to see the bodies of the people we just killed, NAC troopers just like us, maybe people I’ve trained and dropped into combat within the last few years.

“Target,” the pilot says. “Splash one. Fucking idiots.”

I want to shoot back an angry retort, but part of me agrees, so I bite my tongue and hold fire.

“Gunny, frisk the place and secure the intel. We’re going to have to do an EVA transfer from the airlock once you’re done. Docking collar’s ripped to shit.”

“Understood,” comes Philbrick’s reply. “Give the Networks guy about thirty to do his thing.”

“Tell him to expedite,” I say. “Just in case someone noticed all the commotion. I want to be gone before we get bounced by some frigate coming to investigate.”

“Copy that. I’ll keep you updated.”

It takes the Networks guy twenty-one minutes to get all the data off the Neural Networks console in the station’s control center. By then, we are in the middle of an unfavorable rotation, where the station is pointed into the system interior and ready to send whatever updates they were burst-broadcasting every hour. This time, the transmitter stays quiet. We wait out the rotation until we are beyond the apex, and the station is once again hidden by the bulk of the asteroid that plays host to it.

Back in the cargo hold, the platoon medic is patching up Sergeant Nez, who took a fléchette through his face shield that shattered his cheekbone and sliced him open from the side of his nose to his earlobe. Despite the mess that is the left side of his face, he takes the treatment sitting down while joking around with the medic, even though I know from experience that this sort of injury hurts like hell. Four inches to the left and up, and Nez would be in a body bag right now, and yet he’s joking around as if the medic is merely patching up a paper cut. But I know why he’s doing it—I’ve been in the same place, and blowing it off with jokes is much better for your mental health than admitting to yourself how close you just came to getting your dog tags folded.

We retrieve the SI squads one by one by catching them with the open EVA lock of the drop ship, a retrieval method that takes much skill on the part of the pilot and a lot of courage and trust on the part of the troopers who have to push themselves out of the airlock of the station and into open space. But the pilot knows his job, and so do Philbrick’s three fire teams. Just before the next rotation apex, we have the whole squad back on the Blackfly, along with the data we came to take.

The trip back to the task force takes three and a half hours, lots of time for me to review the mission in silence and reflect on the choices I made. We don’t know how many died on the ship we shot down—more than two, and five at the most, which is as many as that type of shuttle can hold. Three to five KIA among the renegade forces—I still have a hard time designating them as “enemy”—and one wounded among our own ranks. We accomplished the mission with minimal casualties on our side, but somehow it doesn’t feel like a success to me. In fact, when we dock with our aviation pod in
Portsmouth
’s flank again, I feel like I’ve fucked up on a grand scale.

CHAPTER 19

“You had to make a tough call, Lieutenant,” Major Masoud says. “But it was the right call.”

“Yes, sir,” I say, even though I am not nearly as convinced as my company commander. I am standing across the holotable from him, and he is sifting through the mission data the drop ship computer uploaded to
Portsmouth
’s tactical network a little while ago.

“You kept EMCON and had your platoon execute a successful assault on an enemy installation. You retrieved the mission objective and eliminated a potential threat to the task force before it could become a problem. And you had no casualties of your own.”

“One wounded,” I object. “Sergeant Nez took a round through his face shield that broke some facial bone.”

“How’s the sergeant doing?”

“He’s in Medical right now, but the corpsman had stitched him together all right on the trip back already. He’ll have a nice scar to show off.”

“Good.” Major Masoud turns his attention back to the data stream in front of him. “You did flawless work on your first platoon leader mission, Lieutenant. For what it’s worth, your performance validates my choice to bring you on board. I don’t think the SEAL platoon could have pulled this off any better. Go square yourself away and take care of your troops. Dismissed.”

I salute the major and turn around to walk out of the ops center, strangely offended by my company commander’s praise.

Back in the platoon bay, Sergeant Fallon and Gunny Philbrick are supervising the post-mission gear maintenance. The quarterdeck—which is what we’ve come to call the open space between enlisted berths and the quarters for the platoon leadership—is full of troopers cleaning weapons and running diagnostics on their gear. The room is abuzz with the usual post-mission chatter. I look over the room for a moment, see that my sergeants have the place well in hand, and go back to my berth, where I close the hatch behind me and strip down for a long shower at maximum water temperature.

The hot water makes me feel marginally better. I’m in the middle of getting dressed in clean CDUs when there’s a knock on the hatch.

“Stand by for ten,” I shout, and finish buttoning up my CDU blouse. Then I walk over to the hatch and open it. Outside, Sergeant Fallon stands in the passageway, arms folded across her chest.

“How did it go?”

“We got it done,” I say. “One WIA, Sergeant Nez.”

“How many of theirs?”

“Three at least. Wasn’t pretty.”

“It never is.” She looks at me with a slightly quizzical expression. “You okay?”

I could invite her into my office and talk about what happened, but I suddenly feel that Sergeant Fallon isn’t the right person to unload my concerns onto. So I just shrug and nod.

“I’m fine,” I say. “Just tired. First mission where I got to do nothing but fly a chair with my ass, and I’m worn out more than if I had cleared the damn station by myself.”

“I hear you. I got to babysit the rest of the platoon and take Third Squad for some cardio while you guys went off to kick in doors and shoot people. But I guess my days of leading assaults are coming to an end. Too many damn rank stripes.”

“I’m pretty sure you’ll get your chance on this run sooner or later,” I say.

“Out here, I’m okay with babysitting,” she says. “I know my limitations.”

She pauses and looks at me as if she wants to say something else. Then she glances over to the quarterdeck and nods.

“They’re not a bad bunch. I may have to revise my opinion of the SI as a bunch of overconfident space monkeys.”

“When they’re done cleaning and stashing their shit, have them grab chow and enforce some rack time for First and Second Squads.”

“Copy that,” she says. “You should do the same. Grab chow and head for your rack.”

“That’s all that’s on my mind right now,” I lie.

Sergeant Fallon walks back to the quarterdeck, and I close the hatch and get my PDP out of my pocket. Then I send Halley a message.

>
Are you free for chow right now? Need to talk.

Her reply comes back maybe twenty seconds later.

>
Be topside in 10.

It’s strange, but for once I don’t want or need my former squad leader’s counsel, even though she has been the closest thing to a mentor I’ve had in my military career. Instead, I just want to talk events over with my wife instead, even though she is not an infantry trooper—or maybe partly because she isn’t one.

Halley and I meet up in the officers’ mess ten minutes later. I grab a meal tray and a drink while she finds us a table, and then I give her the rundown of the mission in between bites while she listens and silently eats her own meal.

“Second Lieutenant Dorian,” she says when I am finished. “That’s your drop ship pilot.”

“He’s good,” I say. “He really knows how to handle his bird. And he didn’t hesitate when I told him to shoot that shuttle down.”

“You were the mission commander,” Halley says. “Had you told me to, I would have done the same thing in his stead.”

“Without flinching?”

Halley stabs her food absentmindedly without taking her eyes off me.

“Is this bugging you? Like Detroit did?”

I consider her question for a moment.

“A little,” I say. “I mean, it’s not like Detroit. Not really. That was a military target. And they had their warning. Several warnings.”

“But.”

“But,” I repeat. “I just feel like I’ve stepped over a line somehow. These are our own guys. And we drew first blood. I did. Not directly, but I ordered my guys to, and they listened.”

“Of course they did. You’re the officer in charge. But you didn’t draw first blood, Andrew. They did. You said they fired first. Injured one of your NCOs.”

“Yeah, they fired first,” I say. “Humphrey told them to freeze. They opened up. And then we did. But that ship? They were unarmed and running away. And I told Lieutenant Dorian to shoot them in the back.”

“They fired on your guys before they boarded their alert bird. And they would have given you away the second they cleared that rock and had line of sight to wherever their home base is. Count on it. I would have,” she adds, and pokes her soy patty again for emphasis.

“I know,” I say. “I know all of that. That’s why I told Dorian to fire.” I shrug. “Still doesn’t mean I’ll ever feel great about it.”

Halley looks at me and shakes her head with a smile.

“See, Andrew, this is one of the reasons why I married you. You don’t just follow orders. You don’t pull that trigger lightly. But you do make the call when you have to. And then you agonize over whether you’ve made the right call.”

“Self-doubt.” I smile. “Not very officer-like, is it?”

“That’s how I know you’re a good person. You doubt yourself. But it’s a good thing when you’re in the killing business. Only a sociopath is always and absolutely sure he’ll always make the right call.”

“Thank you,” I say.

“Don’t mention it,” she replies. Then she puts her fork down, reaches across the table, and puts her hand on mine.

“But remember that they chose this. That crew chose to disregard your warning and keep going. Everyone you’ll come across in this system, they made the choice to blow up our comms relays and steal a trillion dollars’ worth of gear. They made the choice to take their own and then leave us all to die. They had their choice, and they chose to fuck the rest of us. Keep that in mind when you go up against them. Because I sure as hell will. And don’t you lose a single night of sleep over that shuttle.”

At that moment, I feel a profound swell of gratefulness that Halley managed to get herself assigned to this mission, and that I can sit here with her, over this crummy Fleet lunch, and have her give me reassurance. I knew the things she’s telling me all along, of course, but it’s liberating to hear them from my wife, who knows me better than anyone else in the world. We can’t share a berth on this ship, so I won’t be able to fall asleep next to her, but she’s here with me, a hundred and fifty light-years away from Earth, and whatever is going to happen while we’re out here is going to happen to both of us.

“You look like you’ve been awake for a week, Andrew. Finish your damn food and hit the rack while you can, will you?” Halley says in a gently chiding tone.

I am tired—more so than I usually feel after a mission, even though I didn’t do very much, physically speaking. In fact, hitting the rack has a lot more appeal to me right now than finishing the other half of the cheese-and-bologna sandwich and the dollop of fortified vegetable blend next to it. I push my tray across the table toward Halley, who is almost finished with her own food.

“You want this?”

She looks at the remaining half of my sandwich and sticks out her tongue a little.

“I’m good,” she says. “Had enough of the Classic Number One Lunch Combo at Drop Ship U to last me until retirement.”

“Fine.” I pick up the tray again and look for the dish drop. Halley looks up at me with an amused expression and shakes her head slightly.

“Leave it on the table, Lieutenant. The orderly will clean it up. Rank perk, remember?”

“I’ve been an NCO for too long,” I reply, and put the tray down again. “I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to this officer thing.”

“Sleep,” she repeats and nods toward the exit hatch. “You need to be rested next time the balloon goes up.”

Mercifully, the balloon does not go up while I am in my bunk and in a deep, dreamless sleep. Sergeant Fallon either doesn’t need me for platoon business for a watch cycle and a half, or she noticed how much in need of sleep I seemed. When I wake up, it’s not because some ship alert or overhead announcement wakes me, but because my body decides that I am rested enough.

I check the chrono and find that I’ve been out for over eight hours straight, an almost indecent luxury for someone on a warship in the middle of a hot zone. I get up from the bunk, which I never turned down before falling asleep, straighten out the cover blanket, and change into a fresh set of fatigues. Then I check the terminal on my desk for messages and alerts. There are about fifty or so, but none of them are urgent or require immediate replies.

On the other side of the hatch, I hear muffled cheers and the sounds of physical activity out on the quarterdeck. I unlock the hatch and step over the threshold to see what’s going on.