More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Sometimes, the old sergeants talk about the Good Old Days.
Naturally, the Good Old Days came to an end about ten minutes after I signed my enlistment papers.
Only a nutcase would want to get into the service at this point, and you have to have a mental defect to want to stay in after your enlistment contract is up. Naturally, when the time came for me to sign my name again or pack my things and become a civilian once more, I signed on the dotted line.
I didn’t reenlist for the money, of course. I reenlisted because I didn’t know what the hell else to do. All my professional skills revolve around blowing things up or working classified neural-network systems, which makes me pretty much useless in the civilian world.
We’re the corps. This is what we do. The Commonwealth—humanity—is in deep shit, and we’re the people
with the shovels. The trouble is that it’s a huge pile of shit, and they’re very small shovels.
That’s why recon teams get onto alien-controlled worlds by express delivery—ballistic drop pods, fired from the big missile tubes of capital ships. It’s one hell of an exciting way to commute to work.
We’ve met our first competitors in the interstellar struggle for resources, and they are sweeping us out of the way without breaking a sweat.
In a way, I am an angel of death as well, but the power I serve is even more vengeful and merciless than the god of Israel. I’m the one who marks the doorposts in the night, and we pass over none.
Five years of sweating, fighting, and bleeding, with billions of kilometers traveled and over a hundred colony planets visited, and the only thing I have to show for it is a collection of colorful ribbons on my Class A smock and an abstract number in a bank account somewhere in a government computer. If I die in battle next month, there will be no evidence that I ever existed.
On the plus side, when everything you own can fit into a small locker, packing for a move is easy.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” I say, and I mean it. I’ve never felt so much sorrow for my mother in my life, and I’m ashamed when I realize it’s because I’ve never seen her as deserving of empathy. I simply never considered that my mother had a story of her own,
We’ve been the closest thing to family for each other since we met. Let’s make that status official.” She shrugs and gives me a lopsided little smile. If I didn’t know better, I would say she’s nervous. “Might as well get the monetary benefits, too, you know?” she says. I laugh, the tension in me releasing like a decompressing airlock. “Holy shit,” I say. “That’s the most romantic thing you’ve ever said to me.”
There’s a reason why we mostly fight over the new real estate—the old colonies are tough nuts to crack, and they’re hardly ever worth the attendant butcher’s bill.
Staff officers are notoriously overoptimistic in mission briefings, but I can’t help feeling just a little flare of hope that this mission won’t be quite the epic body-bag filler it had appeared to be at first.
At the rate things are going, we have a few more years, a decade at the most, before all our colonies are swallowed by the Lankies, and we have nothing better to do with that borrowed time than to kill each other, like two spoiled kids fighting over how to divide their room while the house is burning down around them.
The Shenzhen dies silently and without drama on the sterile plot display.
Just like that, we have turned thirty thousand tons of starship and five hundred people into a cloud of orbital debris.
In truth, warfare has changed very little since our great-great-grandfathers killed each other at places like Gettysburg, the Somme, Normandy, or Baghdad. It’s still mostly about scared men with rifles charging into places defended by other scared men with rifles.
None of the dead are any less lucky than the others.
As the tail ramp rises up, my last view of Sirius Ad is that of a gaggle of Chinese civvies swarming over the rubble that was their government’s local outpost, and it feels like I’m leaving a prison full of death row inmates, with the executioner striding into the place just as I’m walking out.
“You’ve been in long enough, Grayson. Never assume malice if you can explain it with lack of planning.”
Right now, they’re looking for a way to pin the tail on the donkey, to find someone to take the heat, to make it look like the brass aren’t the collection of ticket-punching career desk pilots they’ve always been.
We’re about to run our heads against the same unyielding barrier, and once again, the brass seem to have concluded that our approach isn’t working because we’re not running at the wall fast enough.
As we prepare to leave Gateway for God knows where, doing God knows what, it’s comforting to know at least one other person on this ship. Having my old squad leader nearby makes me feel a little less alone in the universe right now.
This deployment will be a hasty clusterfuck of epic proportions, and at the end of the day, the grunts and pilots and wrench spinners will be left holding the bag.
I could no more guess her year of birth than estimate the manufacturing date of a well-serviced drop ship. A weapon maintained at peak efficiency is all but ageless.
They say
I have a problem with authority. I say I have a low tolerance for stupid.”
I don’t believe in souls, but if I have one, a big chunk of it died that night in Detroit.
You can choose to follow orders without question, or you can choose to follow the law. Keep in mind that without the law, we’re not a military, just an armed gang that dresses alike.
“If they blow you up, I want you to know that I think you’re a pretty able grunt for a fleet puke. Must be that superior TA influence you got before you had to get all snobby and run off into space.”
Next to me, Sergeant Fallon checks her rifle with the casual thoroughness of someone who has performed the action a million times before. “Well, it was nice being all introspective, Andrew. Now let’s get back to shooting people.”
“You’re our whole C3 section now. Nobody else can use that slick computer of yours.” “I’m touched by your concern, Master Sergeant,” I reply. “Just trying to preserve our limited stock of knuckleheads.”
Do you have a plan of some kind?” Sergeant Fallon smiles.
“That term implies a level of organization that I’m not willing to claim just yet. Right now, we’re still in the ‘winging it’ stage.”
I haven’t seen any clean white snow since that combat drop into Trondheim back in ’99. ’Course, that snow didn’t stay white long.”
“If our time is up, at least we’ll be dying in fresh air,” I say. “With rifles in our hands and a hearty ‘fuck you’ on our lips.”
“’Course, I want to explore every other option before we get to the ‘dying in fresh air’ part.”
“Never mind,” I say. “It’s a super-long shot, but it may actually work.” “I do science all day,” Dr. Stewart says. “Astrophysics. ‘It’s a super-long shot’ is practically the motto of our profession.”
Physics,” she adds with a slight smile. “Nobody’s immune to physics. I don’t care how big and tough they are.”
“I don’t suppose alcohol is allowed on military ships?” Dr. Stewart asks the colonel. “I could really go for a strong drink right now.” “No, it’s not allowed,” he replies. “And of course we have some.”
A former native of Germany, Marko lives in New Hampshire with his wife and two children. Their compound, Castle Frostbite, is patrolled by a roving pack of dachshunds.
