Solfleet: The Call of Duty (43 page)

Dylan,
however...

His first
assignment was to the patrol cruiser
U.E.F.S. Blackhawk
, a vessel
assigned to carry out a variety of paramilitary and interstellar law
enforcement duties within the borders of Solfleet-controlled space, but that
assignment didn’t last very long. He was wounded on his very first away mission
and subsequently transferred to a hospital ship for care. By the time the
doctors declared him fit for duty again a replacement troop had filled his
position, so Command reassigned him to law enforcement duties on Mandela
Station for one year. It was during that tour of duty that he met and
eventually married Carolyn Mitchell.

As luck
would have it, another Security Forces position aboard the
Blackhawk
became
available near the end of that year. Someone onboard pulled a few strings—he
never did find out who—and had him reassigned to the ship. Naturally, Carolyn
wasn’t too thrilled with the idea of her new husband being away for months at a
time for the next four years, but to her credit she realized that military
spouses had been living through long periods of separation for hundreds if not
thousands of years. She also knew how much Dylan missed being out there in deep
space where all the adventure was, so she reluctantly gave him her blessing. It
was hard for Dylan to leave his new bride as well, but he nonetheless welcomed
the chance to rejoin his old shipmates.

At the end
of those four adventurous years, during which time he earned a number of
commendations for his distinguished service, he was given a rear area
assignment that very few Military Policemen, especially those holding the
Security Forces qualifier, ever wanted or had to worry about getting stuck
with. He was appointed as an Internal Affairs Investigator inside the Solfleet
maximum security confinement facility on Luna. He hated the idea of working in
a prison and started looking for a way out of the assignment right away, but the
only slot available within his career field at that particular time was another
four year deep space assignment, and having just completed one Command wasn’t
likely to grant him another one right away. Besides, the previous four years away
had put quite a strain on his marriage. Four more would very likely destroy it.
So he was stuck. Or so he thought.

A couple of
weeks into his tour in the confinement facility, one of his fellow
investigators suggested he look into the Criminal Investigations Division. The C.I.D.
wasn’t exactly what his training had prepared him for, but it was considered to
be within the scope of his career field, and best of all it would get him out
of the confinement facility for good, never to return. And since the C.I.D. was
always looking for new agents to fill their ranks, he figured he had a good
shot. So he applied, and a few months later he was accepted into the C.I.D. Academy.

He graduated
with honors, earning the title and position of Special Agent, and received an
assignment to the Europan office—one of the division’s busier offices and not a
bad place for a new agent to get his feet wet. He approached his new duties
with enthusiasm, but as time went on he discovered that being a C.I.D. Special
Agent wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. It was instead an enormous amount of
desk work and relatively very little of what he’d expected. So, as he
approached the end of his year-long apprenticeship, he submitted a request to Headquarters-Personnel,
asking to be released from the C.I.D. and transferred back to the uniformed
Military Police.

Personnel approved
his request almost immediately, but only in part. He was released from the
C.I.D., but by that time he held the enlisted grade of E-6, a staff sergeant by
rank if not by actual position. He was an experienced non-commissioned officer,
and due to a shortage of NCOs and promotion-eligible lower enlisted personnel
in the Marine Corps, Solfleet had stepped up efforts to recruit a small
percentage of its top MP Security Forces NCOs for ‘voluntary’ transfer to the
Corps. By changing career paths twice in as many years, a practice the fleet
apparently didn’t appreciate very much, Dylan had as good as volunteered.

Voluntold
,
as it were.

With his
release from the C.I.D. granted, he received orders to report immediately to
Solfleet Headquarters for assignment to an accelerated Marine Corps Infantry
training unit. He hadn’t necessarily wanted to go that route—hadn’t wanted to
go that route
at all
, in fact—and his wife had been dead set against it,
but the only other option he’d been given was to rejoin the ranks of the
civilian work force, and he wanted that even less. So he went, and to his
surprise he found that he liked it.

Upon
completion of that training, he received an official letter from the Commandant
of the Marine Corps Rangers, inviting him to try out for a coveted slot among
the ranks of that elite combat regiment. Pleased with his latest
accomplishments, he did so on a whim without even thinking to consult Carolyn
first. He cruised through the tryout process and received a ‘qualified for
acceptance training’ classification. Given the option of accepting an
assignment to a regular infantry unit or going forward with Ranger training, he
surprised even himself. He chose to join the Rangers.

Carolyn, of
course, did not react well at all when she found out.

Ranger training
lasted nearly a year and turned out to be the toughest, most intensive training
he’d ever gone through. When it was finally over the commandant took him aside
and gave him verbal instructions to report directly to Solfleet Command, where
he would receive supplemental assignment orders. When he complied with those
instructions, he found himself facing one of the most difficult decisions of
his career.

The ongoing
Coalition-Veshtonn war had cost Earth and her allies dearly. But nowhere were
Earth’s losses more devastating, from a percentage point of view, than in that
division of the service that didn’t even officially exist. The 7
^th
Marine
Corps Ranger Battalion—a top secret branch of the Rangers, known unofficially
to some as the ‘Panthers’, that fell under the direct authority of the Solfleet
Intelligence Agency’s Special Operations Command. Assignment to that
non-existent battalion was and always had been strictly voluntary and difficult
to obtain, and he was being asked to volunteer.

He’d
wondered at the time if he should even dare consider it. Carolyn had been pretty
upset over his decision to transfer to the Marines and she’d been downright
furious when he joined the Rangers, so he’d had serious doubts. But then he had
an idea. Since 7
^th
Battalion was a part of the Rangers, he could
just tell her that he’d been assigned to that unit at random. She didn’t have
to know that assignment to Special Ops was strictly voluntary.

That had
been the decision-maker. Still surfing high on his roaring wave of success, he’d
proudly accepted assignment to the most elite of the elite, and for the past
nine months he’d served with distinction in his current capacity as a SpecOps
Ranger squad sergeant on Cirra, the fourth planet of the Caldanra star system—Caldanra
being the star’s indigenous name—helping to protect the Earth colonists and the
virtually human Cirran natives from the terrorism of their extremist Sulaini
brothers from the fifth. And, of course, doubling as a part of what would be
the first line of defense should the Veshtonn ever again invade the system.

The overhead
lighting changed from its normal soft blue-white to a not too bright blood red,
startling Dylan from his reverie. “
Coming up on insertion point,
” the
pilot announced over the intercom.

“On your
feet!” the lieutenant called out from the front of the cabin.

Dylan and
the eight men and four women who comprised his squad stood up and faced
forward, forming two columns, and conducted a final check of their weapons and equipment.
Then they fastened their oxygen masks into place and gave the lieutenant a
thumbs-up signal as soon as they were ready.

“Man the
capsules,” the young officer ordered.

The
black-clad commandos moved to the port and starboard sides of the shuttle and
squeezed into their seven foot tall, matte-black, torpedo-shaped drop capsules.
As the hatches closed, the lieutenant stepped up and checked each capsule’s
pressure gauge to verify the integrity of the seal.

As squad
sergeant, Dylan climbed into his capsule last, as soon as the lieutenant gave
him the go-ahead with a single nod. Once inside he reached up and grasped the
rubber handles at the periphery of his vision and the hatch immediately dropped
into place and sealed him in. Then he pushed the toes of his boots against the
plastisteel stops and locked his feet into the bindings. Seconds later the
lieutenant appeared just beyond the narrow viewport, verifying the seal, just
as he had done for the others.

“Good luck,
Sergeant,” he said over the comm-link.

“Thank you,
sir.”

The
lieutenant looked him in the eye—not an easy thing to do, considering how
narrow that little viewport really was. “We’ll be there if you need us.”

“I’m
depending on it, sir.” And he knew, somehow, that he could.

“Everyone
goes home.” With that, the lieutenant stepped away.

A deafening
silence filled the capsule. As he waited, Dylan imagined he could hear his own
heart beating. Or was he really hearing it? He could never be quite sure. He
could feel it pounding hard against his chest as if it were trying to escape. That
was certainly real enough.

He drew a
deep breath to try to relax, but the cabin lighting changed again at that same
moment, this time from red to amber, and the pounding continued unabated. The flight
engineer was slowly depressurizing the cabin. “I knew I should’ve joined the
Aerospace Force,” he said aloud, just as he always did right before a drop.

And just
like his predecessor before him, the new lieutenant pointed out, “I don’t know
what you’re bitching about, Sergeant. You’re already flying, and you’re about
to solo.”

“Yes, sir.
Straight down, sir,” he answered back, completing the ritual.

Moments
later, amber changed to green. Then, about every three seconds or so, the floor
plate vibrated beneath Dylan’s feet. Locking clamps were disengaging and the
stealth-tech capsules were being jettisoned in pairs through their launch
tubes. The vibrations grew stronger each time until Dylan’s stomach suddenly leapt
into his mouth. Were it not for the boot bindings holding him down, he would
have come off the floor and struck his head.

Just as
normal procedure dictated that the squad sergeant always be the last to climb
into his capsule, it also dictated that he be the last to drop. That way he
could count off those launch vibrations and know whether or not all the other
capsules had jettisoned without any problems. It was a philosophy Dylan
disagreed with—he’d always believed a leader should lead the way, not bring up
the rear—but it was what it was. The Corps hadn’t consulted him when it wrote
up its doctrine and his personal disagreement with it didn’t mean squat to
anyone.

This time
the capsules had all launched successfully, thank God—he needed every single
trooper on this mission—and as he dropped blindly through the night, he
imagined what the scene might look like from the outside. The small black
rectangular silhouette of the troop-shuttle soaring high against the
diamond-studded deep purple-black sky, spitting out its thirteen coffin-sized
capsules in pairs, plus his own at the end, sending them plunging like a baker’s
dozen freefalling missiles toward the planet surface so far below.

“
Thirty
seconds to capsule dispersion,
” the onboard computer announced. “
Air pressure
and temperature adjustment steady.
”

He counted
off the seconds in his head. Twenty-five, twenty-four, twenty-three, twenty-two,
twenty-one...

“
Twenty
seconds to capsule dispersal. Air pressure and temperature adjustment steady.
”

“Ten
seconds. Stand by to disengage cap locks,” Dylan mumbled in anticipation.

“
Ten
seconds. Stand by to activate cap release.
”

Close
enough. Dylan tightened his grip on the handles. He yawned, and his ears
popped.

“
Five
seconds. Activate cap release.
”

He twisted
the handles with a sharp jerk, disengaging the cap locks, and the entire
power-locking mechanism assembly tore away, taking the power source that had
maintained the capsule’s structural integrity field with it. The sudden absence
of that energy field allowed for the thunderous release of all remaining
internal pressure, which exploded through the capsule’s abruptly destabilized
walls and inner ceiling, reducing them to several million bits of harmless,
scanner-blinding dust, as designed. Deaf to all but the torrent of wind that suddenly
engulfed him, Dylan tumbled freely through the cold, black sky.

The
disorientation only lasted for a few seconds, but the exhilaration, he knew,
would be with him all the way to the ground. He loved to jump, and he knew that
had he not transferred to the Rangers he might never have gotten the opportunity
to try it. Perhaps there were benefits to this assignment after all.

He stretched
his arms and legs to the four corners of the compass, flattening himself out to
create drag and minimize his acceleration. Then, when he’d counted off the
correct number of seconds, he pulled his arms in and placed his hands on his
buttocks, going vertical to accelerate more rapidly. He could see no sign of
his troops below against the fast approaching black jungle canopy, but that was
to be expected.

“
Ten
seconds,
” his helmet’s altimeter announced through the speaker at his left
ear.