Angles of Attack (Frontlines #3)(8)
I don’t belong on this ship. I have a loaner berth and a loaner armor set, but I don’t know a soul on the Regulus. The SI troopers from the Midway who embarked with me on this drop are quartered in the section of the ship that usually hosts the Regulus’s own SI regiment. I took a berth in the NCO quarters of the fleet section, well away from the Midway grunts, and with the Regulus running a skeleton crew, it’s a pretty quiet run back to New Svalbard. For the first time in weeks, I don’t have access to an all-seeing ship network or external sensor arrays, and I’m just another passenger. I sleep, I eat, I work out, and I go out of my way not to have to talk to anyone except the occasional SEAL or Spaceborne Rescue podhead in line for chow. When we arrive back in orbit over New Svalbard after six days of boring and uneventful interplanetary cruise, I’m so bored that I almost wish we had another Lanky on our tail and just a few days to find a way to kill it.
“You look like you need some of the local rotgut,” Sergeant Fallon says by way of greeting when I walk down the ramp of the Regulus drop ship that ferried me down to New Svalbard’s airfield. The weather has gotten a lot worse in the week I was gone. The snowdrifts by the sides of the squat hangars nearby are four or five meters high, and there’s a sixty-knot polar wind blowing across the open space and whipping the snow sideways. Sergeant Fallon is in her battle armor, which is ice-caked, and she only raises her visor briefly when she walks up to me to help me with my gear.
“That’s some grade-A shit weather,” I say to her. “Shuttle got delayed three hours waiting for a break in the storm.”
“This isn’t a storm,” she says. “This is fucking balmy. You can actually see ahead for more than ten meters. Everything has moved underground. And I mean everything. The whole town. Did you know they have a whole damn recreation district underground?”
“No, I did not know that.”
“They call it the Ellipse. Come on, stow your new toys, and I’ll take you down to the bar. They have a thing called a Shockfrost cocktail. I don’t know what’s in it, but it will make you think you can arm-wrestle a Lanky.”
The Ellipse is an underground concourse that makes a loop underneath a large chunk of New Svalbard. Sergeant Fallon leads me around like a tour guide. All the bunker-like houses on the surface have secondary subterranean exits that lead to neighborhood tunnels, and all of those tunnels converge on the Ellipse. In the winter months, when nobody can spend much time on the surface in hundred-knot polar winds, life moves underground on New Svalbard.
The tunnel that makes up the Ellipse is twenty meters or more in diameter. I always wondered where the settlers of New Svalbard have their shops and pubs and where social life happens, and now I have my answer. Colonial economies are rough and basic, much like the black markets in the PRC back home, and a lot about the Ellipse and its warrens of shops and vendor stalls reminds me of life back home before I joined the service.
“You going to tell me about the drop with our new pals, or what?” Sergeant Fallon asks as we stride down the concourse, which has many more colonists milling around on it than I’ve ever seen on the surface streets here in New Longyearbyen. The locals are ice miners, hydroponic farmers, engineers, aviation service crews, and their families. Occasionally, we pass HD troopers from our newly minted New Svalbard Territorial Army, who give us respectful nods or salute Sergeant Fallon outright. Regardless of prior rank structures, we are both part of the small group who was in charge of the mutiny a few weeks ago, when Sergeant Fallon and her exiled Homeworld Defense troopers refused to follow orders to seize colonial assets. The resulting battle with the hardheaded elements of the Spaceborne Infantry cost us nearly forty casualties on both sides, along with several aviation assets we could ill afford to write off, not with so few humans in the Fomalhaut system, most of them dug into a moon with very few military assets of its own.
“Best drop I’ve ever done, really,” I say. “By-the-book planetary assault, few casualties, all mission goals accomplished. You should have been there. Could have gotten some trigger time against the Lankies in. Those Russian marines do not fuck around, let me tell you.”
“Oh, I have no doubt. I met a few of them at Dalian during that lovely proxy battle we fought with the SRA. ’Course, they were in sterile uniforms back then. Svalbard Accords and all.”
I don’t know a lot of Sergeant Fallon’s service history before I met her five years ago in the Territorial Army’s 365th Autonomous Infantry Battalion, but I do know from my former squad mates that the Battle of Dalian was where she earned her Medal of Honor. I know it was a police action that went south and filled a lot of TA body bags, but the official history is fuzzy on the details, which probably means that we technically or brazenly violated a treaty or three.
“You have to tell me about that one of these days,” I say.
Sergeant Fallon just smirks. “Andrew, the level of alcohol I need to drink to start telling details about Dalian pretty much guarantees that I won’t be able to recall those details. Speaking of alcohol . . . here we are. Welcome to On the Rocks.”
She points to a shop front that takes up about twenty meters of the tunnel wall up ahead on our right. In most other settings, the fake blown-glass windows and the obviously resin-molded knobby tree trunks that decorate the front of the establishment would be tacky, but down here it’s a welcome splash of colorful kitsch in a place where most everything else is the color of ice and grimy concrete.