Angles of Attack (Frontlines #3)(6)

When the last drop ship full of SRA civvies and straggler garrison troops is in the air, the colony town is a deserted pile of rubble, littered with broken things and dead Lankies. The mixed platoon on the ground with me gathers our casualties and prepares for egress. Two drop ships are waiting for us on the edge of the old SRA military airfield, tail ramps down and engines running. There are still plenty of Lankies on this rock, but the ones that are spotted from the air by our recon flights are milling around singly or in small groups. After we blasted the approaching Lanky group in the nearby ravine with kinetic warheads, the Lankies have made no more attempts to retake the settlement and stop the evacuation. On the contrary, the ones that are still in the area seem to take pains to steer well clear of us. The Shrikes are still engaging targets of opportunity all over this part of the moon’s hemisphere, but there are still hundreds of Lankies scattered all over the moon, and it would take us another month to kill every last one of them from the air. We got what we came for, and now it’s time to hotfoot it away from this place before another seed ship shows up in orbit and ruins the party.

The waiting drop ships are a Wasp and an Akula. The Russian part of the platoon boards the Akula, while the NAC troops tromp up the loading ramp of the Wasp. We are returning to our respective bird farms, which don’t have docking clamps for the other side’s hardware.

“Good luck, Dmitry,” I tell my SRA counterpart as we walk over to our rides together.

“Same to you, Andrew,” he says. “Maybe we won’t kill each other for a while, eh? I see you on the battlefield, I try to wound you instead, maybe.”

I’m the last to walk up the Wasp’s ramp. When I glance back over the devastation that is the old SRA garrison, I see that Dmitry is over by the tail end of the Akula, watching me as I walk aboard. It’s only when my boots are on the steel of the Wasp’s ramp that he starts to board his own boat. I sketch a little salute, and he returns it precisely and by the book.

I know why he waited until I was off the moon before he climbed aboard his own ride.

First ones in, last ones out. Our profession makes us the first to put boots on the ground, and the last to leave the dirt at the end of a mission. This was an SRA settlement, so their combat controller made sure he was the last one onto the last ship off this rock. It seems that some traditions translate across our respective military cultures.

I strap into the last available seat on the crowded Wasp and secure my weapon. Behind me, the tail ramp whines as the crew chief seals the hatch for spaceflight. In the space down the centerline of the Wasp between the two rows of seats, I count five body bags. We’ve done our share today, sweated and bled onto SRA-owned ground to rescue civilians we would have left behind to die just a month or two ago. Maybe we are evolving as a species after all, now that we’re facing our extinction.

Maybe the Lankies should have showed up a few thousand years ago.





CHAPTER 2





I’ve been in the fleet for five years, hopping ships every six months after combat-controller school, and I’ve never been on a Navigator-class supercarrier until this week. The Navigators are the pride of the fleet, half again as large by tonnage as the next-biggest class of carrier and easily the most powerful warships anyone has ever put into space. But they’re too rare and valuable to shove into the kind of action I’ve mostly seen in the last few years, so I’ve never gotten to walk the decks of one until now.

The sheer size of the Regulus is exaggerated by the lack of personnel on board. I know the staffing levels of a carrier and the general amount of activity on board, and if I had to guess, I’d say that the Regulus is running ops with half her regular crew at the most. She was in for an overhaul and resupply at the Europa fleet yards when the Lankies appeared in the solar system and took Mars, and they pressed her into action with her maintenance crew and whatever personnel they could scrounge up at Europa. The NAC Defense Corps took the worst mauling of its history in the failed defense of Mars, and there isn’t much left to scrape out of the barrel. Regulus wasn’t ready for combat until the Battle of Mars was already over, and all that was left to do for her was to take her escorts and run. For all I know, Regulus may be the last of the Navigators by now. For all I know, we humans in the Fomalhaut system may be the last of our species.

The post-mission debriefing in the Regulus’s SpecOps detachment’s briefing room is an agreeably low-key affair. I was the only NAC combat controller on the ground, and the other fleet SpecOps guys in the room are two Spaceborne Rescuemen and a SEAL team from the Regulus, and three teams of SI recon from Camp Frostbite’s Spaceborne Infantry garrison. The Midway left half her embarked SI regiment at Frostbite when she tucked tail and ran with the rest of the task force.

I walk into the briefing room and take a chair in the back, behind the SEAL team and on the opposite side of the room from the SI recon guys. The short and violent bloodshed during our mutiny on New Svalbard is still fresh in everyone’s memory, and some of the SI troopers have given me hostile glances or made unfriendly remarks in the mess hall on our weeklong ride here. Until we’re back in orbit above New Svalbard, I’ll be doing my best to avoid getting caught in some low-traffic corner of this ship with half a dozen pissed-off space apes between me and the exit hatch.

The SpecOps commander on the Regulus is a hard-faced major named Kelly. He has prematurely gray hair and the worn-out, hard-lived look common to veteran fleet SpecOps personnel. Our lifestyle is extremely taxing on our bodies and minds, and most lifers in our branch look at least ten years older than their actual age.